


Sleepers of Ephesus

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Series: Sleepers of Ephesus [2]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Awesome Peggy Carter, Friendship, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Male-Female Friendship, POV Peggy Carter, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Regret, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-14 07:46:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 49,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5735494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy Carter is far from home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Peggy woke up in a heap, a tangle of limbs she'd never have settled into on her own.

"Oh, Christ on a cracker."

The soreness as she sat up confirmed that she'd been thrown wherever she was now and her right shoulder popped loudly as she rolled it; it was probably only her imagination that the noise echoed throughout the room.

It was too dark to see anything, no windows or lights, not even a glimmer of a glow anywhere, and so she didn't know where she was or how she'd gotten here. She heard nothing, no breathing, no distant voices or music or airplanes or subways, no scrape of furniture against floor, nothing that could give her a clue where she was or if there was anyone with her. She sensed something solid behind her, which proved to be a wall, and leaned against it as she stretched her legs in front of her and tried to figure out what the bloody hell had happened. 

The last thing she remembered was going up to Groton with Sousa at the Navy's request... _Daniel_. Was he here with her? Was he hurt?

She whispered his name a few times, then pushed herself to kneeling to feel around in case he'd been knocked out as she'd been. But she heard and felt nothing and accepted that if he'd been caught along with her, whoever had them had likely separated them. And if he hadn't been caught with her, he was either already sending for reinforcements or he was dead and beyond her concern, at least for the moment.

Getting out of here, wherever here happened to be, remained her first and foremost task.

With her right hand sliding up the wall for guidance, she stood up carefully, then started walking slowly counterclockwise around the room. She hoped to find some sort of obstacle she could use as a weapon -- a chair, a table, a convenient pry bar -- or toward an escape. There had to be a door or a blacked-out window somewhere; she hadn't been spirited into a room with no exit. She had lost her shoes somewhere along the way, so she padded silently along the cold tile floor in her stockings, counting her steps so she'd have a sense of how large the room was. Nine steps into the second wall, she felt a window ledge. But when she felt along the ledge to the window itself, there was an iron grate over it. She felt along the grate to see if there was a lock she could maybe pick -- there were still some pins left in her hair -- but she couldn't find one. 

"Damn it."

The third wall had nothing, the fourth wall had a seam that should have meant a doorway, but she couldn't find a knob or a handle or, when she felt further along the wall, any hinges. The door opened outward, but there was no way to do so from the inside. A prison cell, then, either purpose-built or something else like a retasked walk-in meat locker. There would be no escape without knowing more. So she sat down next to the seam, waiting for whoever had put her here to return, and tried to piece together how she'd gotten here in the first place. 

The Navy had called the SSR because there had been three attempts to break into one of the experimental submarine propulsion labs and the third attempt had left some 'peculiar' evidence behind. Post-war, the SSR had become the clearinghouse for anything too weird to be easily explained by the military's own investigative services, mostly because it shifted the blame off of their shoulders. In this case, the Navy had reached out because the would-be thieves had tried to cut their way through steel doors with something that might have been a blowtorch but had left a scorch pattern more like what HYDRA's blasters had done at close range. Whether it would be better for it to be a HYDRA blaster in some criminal's hand, a fragment of HYDRA itself, or some new danger with some new weapon had still been up for discussion. Blasters were hard to come by even for the most enterprising of criminal organizations, so the thought had been that it was either a surviving HYDRA splinter cell or something new. Howard had been consulted for the latter and had dumbfounded them all with the breadth of possibilities, but half of what he'd told them about hadn't been invented yet and he wasn't sure when it would be. The other half... Howard was the smartest boy on the block, but he was hardly the only genius and the Soviets had taken their share of the intellectual loot as a prize of war.

That the Soviets were trying to steal submarine secrets from the Navy was a more comfortable notion to those in charge than the idea that HYDRA had recovered well enough to make itself a force again, so that had been the angle Peggy and Sousa had been told to follow up first. Peggy hadn't been so sure and had said as much to no effect, but Daniel, away from the office and its politics, had been willing to listen and admitted that they could not go about looking to find evidence that fitted the conclusion they hoped to reach. Nothing they'd looked at so far had been definitive one way or another - the Naval Intelligence files had been a bizarre mix of pulp fiction and precise ass-covering -- and so the only way forward was with an open mind. 

All of which had led her to a closed room, it would seem. She hoped Daniel was all right, wherever he was, and admitted that, just this once, she would not mind being the damsel in distress rescued by the knights in shining armor. (She would be willing to bite her tongue just this once.) 

Her first visitors were not the cavalry, however, sneering or otherwise. She had dozed off at some point -- constant vigilance was exhausting -- and woke up to the sound of the door being unlocked. She slid up the wall to standing and pressed herself against it next to the door's seam, waiting to strike as soon as someone came through. The door opened silently and the light that came through was spellbinding after so much darkness, but she pounced on the first man through the door and brought him down to the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of her victim and cause herself some pain as her left knee hit the tile floor hard. They wrestled and she maintained her position on top -- once upon a time, she hadn't watched the Commandos tussle purely for the aesthetics -- but that only left her primed to be dragged away by the others who'd followed. She ended up pinioned to the wall at the armpits by two sets of strong hands gripping tightly and her legs held fast by those of her captors. 

The lights flicked on and burned her eyes with their brightness, making them tear. She blinked to clear them, but still couldn't see the owner of the voice who spoke first. 

"Considering what the old lady did," a woman said somewhere to her left, "you should have been more careful. Gonzalez, Reitman, make sure you've got a good grip before you move her. Lindberg, get off the floor and go put your dignity back together somewhere else."

Peggy's eyes had cleared enough to see that the woman speaker was a tall colored woman dressed in men's clothing and she was holding a pistol of some kind in her left hand. 

"Good morning, Agent Carter," the woman said with a smile, putting a curious emphasis on the 'Agent' as Lindberg scrambled to his feet and dusted himself off before stalking away without a word of protest. "So glad you could join us. If you'd please come with us, this can all be taken care of with the minimum of fuss."

Peggy had no idea what 'this' was, but it undoubtedly was nothing good. The colored woman had an accent Peggy couldn't place; it wasn't any kind of Slavic, but that didn't mean that she wasn't a Soviet spy. It perhaps made it less likely that she was HYDRA, however; Schmidt and his followers hadn't hewed as closely to the Aryan purity dreams of Hitler's inner circle, but that didn't mean they'd put an untermensch in a position of authority even in these desperate times. 

"And if I choose not to?" Peggy asked, entirely to gauge her situation. She was immobilized apart from her head and resistance was clearly rhetorical. 

The woman held up the pistol. "Then this will light you up like a Christmas tree and the next time you wake up, you'll be covered in your own piss. And then we'll have this conversation again, so I really do recommend the path of least resistance. You did not travel with a change of clothes."

Peggy didn't struggle as she was peeled off of the wall, the grips on her armpits transitioning smoothly to ones capable of dragging her along the floor if she so much as stumbled in her gait. They moved through a brightly-lit hallway devoid of signage or identifying characteristic. Cinderblock walls painted beige and fluorescent lighting along the ceiling; they could have been anywhere or nowhere and it wasn't until they had paraded to the metal door at the end of the hall that she picked up on any kind of clue: there was no smell of cigarettes. Not the heady fug of freshly burned tobacco, not the stale odor of old smoke, nothing at all. In Peggy's experiences as spy and spy-runner, she'd come across very few places where this was the case -- the Project Rebirth scientists had thought nothing of dangling half-ashed cigarettes near open flames and bottles of dangerous reagents -- and none of them were good. 

The room was a plain interrogation room, unadorned walls and bare table and uncomfortable chairs and a two-way mirror along the back wall. There was no tape recorder, but that only meant that she couldn't see it. She was directed to the chair facing the mirror and sat down on her own, smoothing her wrinkled skirt like this was an interview and not an interrogation. The image in the mirror was a mess, hair and makeup mussed and ruined, and she carded her fingers through her hair to make it less wild (without disturbing any of the pins, which might be useful later) and using her thumb to minimize the wreck of her lipstick. And then she looked over to the colored woman and smiled. "Shall we begin?"

The woman did not smile back. She watched Peggy carefully as she sat down opposite her, still obviously in control but less absolute about it. Like Peggy was somehow a much greater threat now sitting docilely at a table than she'd been when she'd attacked Lindberg in her cell. It was an interesting reaction, one to consider at a later time, but right now, there was an interrogation to manage. She'd had lessons in this, first from the British SIS and then later from the Americans when she'd been seconded to the SSR, and there'd been the post-war refresher course once the language of their enemies had switched from German to Russian. The basic premise was very simple: there was very little information actually worth dying for and she was not in possession of most of it. Therefore, her objective was not to go to her death without breathing a word, but to instead tell her captors as little as possible without sacrificing either her life or her honor. There were many tricks and tips for accomplishing this and they'd been encouraged to pick a few and practice them so that they would feel natural should they actually need to be applied. 

There was little need to prevaricate or dissemble for the first question; her ignorance was unfeigned when the woman asked her where Shield had hidden HYDRA's maser.

"Who is Shield?" Peggy asked because "what on earth does that mean?" would have been too strong, if more accurate. The other half of enduring an interrogation in captivity was learning as much about your captors as possible. The questions themselves were valuable information; she could ask Howard what a maser was later on and if he'd ever known that HYDRA had had one. She presumed more than a few of HYDRA's toys had disappeared into Howard's playrooms after the war, but if he didn't have it, then he'd know where it was. But the mysterious Shield... was this the name of a clandestine agent? A double for HYDRA or a triple for the SSR? Was this someone they thought she knew about because of her war work? Nobody they'd run had carried that codename and she didn't remember it being used for any other agents, but that didn't mean it hadn't been. She'd carried a spectacularly high clearance during the war, but that clearance hadn't gotten her too much from other agencies; the OSS could have had a Shield and they'd have never have told anyone even if asked. 

Her interrogator sighed. "That is your opening gambit? To profess ignorance of the organization that you lead, _Director_ Carter?" 

Peggy laughed to cover her confusion. Shield was not a person, then. A working group? It couldn't have been anything the SSR had run during the war; she'd have known. The Commandos weren't the only ones bringing back HYDRA toys for the scientists and analysts to play with, but it hadn't been such a large operation that she would never have heard of a find so great that she'd be kidnapped years later to acquire it. Howard would never have let Steve and the boys live it down if they'd been scooped so badly at the time.

"I'm sorry," she said, since a response was required in situations like this. "But if you think I'm the director of anything other than my own booster club, you are sadly misinformed." 

The answer to that was the firing of the fat pistol, which carried quite the electrical shock that had been promised and sent her headlong into darkness. 

When she awoke, she was not covered in her own urine, but that was only a technicality brought on by dehydration and hardly a complete blessing as a little went a long way. She felt truly revolting as she slid along the tile floor of what was probably her earlier prison cell, away from the damp spot. She was scared, yes, but she was not broken. Not even a little cracked. She'd experienced something painful and horrible and did not relish going through it again in the slightest, but she knew she could survive it just fine. 

She revised that conclusion slightly as she wobbled on her feet once her captors had come to drag her back into the light of the hallway and the interrogation room. She was twitchy and weak, the after-effects of the shock, no doubt. But she'd seen Howard and Abe and the others electrocute themselves a dozen times as they'd built the machine that would transform Steve and she knew it wouldn't last. 

The first question today was the same as the previous day's -- Peggy assumed it had only been a day, the hair on her legs was still prickly and itchy -- but, small mercy, the response to her identical answer was not. Her interrogator nodded once and then asked her about a magnet the Commandos had brought back from Pontarlier, which Peggy responded to with complete honesty because she knew it didn't matter much -- the magnet had been made of an interesting material that nobody had been able to identify, but it had otherwise just been a magnet. Anything Howard had let the Commandos play with as a toy would not have had strategic value and the boys had spent most of a week pranking each other by magnetizing various articles of their kits before Sergeant Barnes had put a stop to it after finding his razor stuck to a steam pipe over Colonel Phillips's office door. 

Her cooperation got her a bottle of Saratoga Springs water, which startled her for being made of plastic and not the glass that it had looked like when it had been set down in front of her. She drank it anyway, desperately thirsty and not caring if it were drugged. Truth serums were mostly fictional and the ones that could do some harm, well, if they were going to keep asking her about things she knew nothing about, having her inhibitions lowered far enough would only make her that much cruder in her ignorance.

But the water was without adulteration and the next question was about Project Rebirth. Peggy lied about the answer because it was about what happened after Abe's murder and that, at least, neither HYDRA nor the Soviets had ever figured out. She thought she'd been quite clever about it, substituting a plausible falsehood in the middle of a largely truthful statement, but her interrogator stood up angrily and ordered Peggy returned to her cell. 

"This was to have been yours," the colored woman said as she held up a clear bag full of fruit and what looked to be a wrapped sandwich. "But I will not reward lies."

The hours passed uncomfortably in the darkness; she was desperately hungry to the point of being weakened by it and she stank and the floor was cold and hard and she was sore. She still didn't understand why she'd been taken or by whom, even as it was obvious that they had wanted her and not just the first SSR agent they'd come across. But there'd been no communist propaganda, no ranting about the proletariat or the evils of capitalism. There'd been no blithering on about HYDRA, either. Who else it could be, she had no idea, not yet. And until she did, it was largely pointless to speculate and so she tried to find a comfortable position to sleep in... until the lights turned on and loud noise and screaming filled her cell. It was some sort of music, she realized, rhythmic without being melodic, but the vocals were growls and muttering and it could have no other purpose than its current one. There was no more sleep. 

Dizzy and disoriented and weak, she was dragged back to the interrogation room however many hours later. She forced herself to focus and to look at her reflection in the two-way mirror and adjust her hair as best she could; she looked a fright, but she would be a fright with some dignity and so she finger-curled the lank tresses that fell into her eyes. 

She got through her bottle of water and then an apple before it was all taken away again and she was returned to her cell. This time, there was no darkness, just hours with the blaring noise and bright lights. The cell stank -- she had a bucket to use as a chamber pot, but it was not emptied out -- and she stank and she was exhausted and so hungry that she didn't even feel hunger anymore, just lassitude and light-headedness made worse by the inability to fully rest. She wondered where Daniel was, what Dooley thought had happened, whether anyone would find her now or even later, if she died here. She might, she accepted, although probably not by intent. She appreciated the interrogation techniques on an intellectual level, could see how subtly dangerous they really were, even as she understood what her captors were and were not doing. They were making sure she did not die by giving her just enough water and food to live, which was significant. As was the fact that after the initial electrocution, there had been no physical violence. Her interrogator expressed dismay and disappointment verbally and did not even threaten to bring out the weapon again. Which did not mean that physical torture was off the table; quite the opposite -- by bringing it out so quickly and then shelving it, they had made sure she understood that they would not hesitate to return to it later on and that there would be no mercy once they did. 

It was an effective threat in that it was something she'd have to keep in the back of her mind, whether she wanted to or not. But after days of little sleep and less food, it did not keep her from passing out in her cell.

The next day, almost giddy with exhaustion and hunger, she was asked about Shield again and HYDRA's maser and when she still did not know what either of those things were, she was struck across the face. 

"This has gone on long enough," the colored woman told her in her lilting voice as Peggy fought the urge to either strike back or hold her burning cheek. "You will tell us what you know about where your organization has hidden the maser prototype. You cannot expect us to believe that you do not know anything about the agency you founded or what it has done. Or what you yourself have done, Director. We know you took possession of the maser on the fourth of March, 1949. And you will tell us what you did with it or you will suffer greatly."

Peggy took a moment to gather her racing thoughts before giving in to the urge to laugh hysterically. "My god," she wheezed breathlessly, lightheaded and giggling from the utter ridiculousness of what she'd just heard. And of her situation -- she'd been captured, quite efficiently, by lunatics who'd read too many space serials. "You people are all _mad_. How on earth am I to know what I did in March of 1949 when it hasn't happened yet?" 

The woman looked horrified and furious, but not entirely at Peggy and not, Peggy thought, for being called a madwoman. 

"What is today's date?" the woman asked Peggy sharply. 

"I have no idea," Peggy retorted, feeling a surge of energy for unsettling her opponent. Let them be off-balance for a minute, although it appeared that the lack of balance was permanent. Really, a director of an agency in 1949 when Dooley wouldn't even let her run a full caseload now. "But you grabbed me on the twentieth of April, 1946 and you'll have to do the reckoning from there on your own."

She didn't think it had been much more than a week, although she also wouldn't have been that surprised to find out it had only been a few days. Time had no meaning in this place, at least not to her, and her captors had been quite effective at keeping her from marking its passage. Which was perhaps embarrassing now that she knew that they were all barmy, but their tactical capacity did not seem touched by their collective insanity. 

"Oh, Jesus Christ," the woman spat out, looking first at Peggy and then turning around to whoever was behind the two-way mirror. And then she abruptly started walking toward the door, slamming it shut behind her. 

"Was it something I said?" Peggy asked cheerfully to the unseen faces on the other side of the glass. 

After a few minutes of waiting, Peggy got up from her chair and started walking around the room. She put her nose up to the glass to look behind it -- she'd done it in the SSR offices and knew that it was possible to see through it if the light was right on the other side. But either the light was too dim or this glass was made of other material because she could see nothing. So she turned away and investigated the rest of the room, finding the stash of water bottles -- she drank two and opened a third -- and then a brown paper bag that had a turkey sandwich in it. She was finishing off both the third water bottle and the sandwich when the door opened again and a man entered. He was followed by two other men, burly and tall, and Peggy resigned herself to a return to her cell. 

At least the cell had been cleaned in her absence. The lights were off and remained off, which almost felt like a reward -- which in turn was part of the process. But it did not matter much to her right now and she took the opportunity to rest on a full stomach. When she woke up, it was still dark in her cell and she went back to sleep because she could. She woke a second time to the lights turning on and the door opening and the phalanx of guards that was her escort to the interrogation room. 

When she arrived, the colored woman was there, as usual, but the questions were new. They had nothing to do with HYDRA and were about regular events, like who was the mayor and how much it cost to ride the subway and what office James Mead held. They were testing her on events of 1946, she understood, not by whether she knew the answers, but how quickly she knew the answers. After a few years, memories of unimportant things grew indistinct and if she'd been lying, she'd have had to think about her replies. But since she wasn't the lunatic in this asylum, she did not have to do any such thing. Although she had no idea how the Giants were doing in the pennant race; Howard rooted for them with a casual interest, so unless they were doing spectacularly well or spectacularly badly, he rarely mentioned them. 

She apparently knew her current events well enough to be given food and water, which she swallowed quickly, before any answers could displease them into taking it away. 

The questions eventually circled back to HYDRA, but instead of asking about the maser, the questions were about the organization and who had survived and that was less dangerous ground. Or at least it should have been. She lied about Johann Straum, who'd been taken prisoner in the raid that had cost Steve his life, because he had been HYDRA's best physicist and had been taken out to Los Alamos to work on the nuclear program unbeknownst to the Soviets -- or anyone else not the Brits. Straum was officially listed as deceased and she told her interrogators that, only to be screamed at for her falsehood. She'd been startled by the shouting, but also by the concern that these people weren't taking a wild guess or making another flight of fancy, as they had about the future. Straum, as far as she knew, wasn't subject to the same kind of conspiracy theories that followed Schmidt -- or Steve. Nobody wrote letters to the newspapers insisting that Johann Straum was alive and well and living on a farm in Iowa, or whatever the latest one was. So either these people were the first Straum conspiracists or they had knowledge that Straum was alive and well and living in New Mexico and that was a dangerous thing. 

Her dishonestly about Straum got her sent back to her cell. She went to sleep straightaway in case they were angry enough to start blasting noise with the lights on again, but was woken up instead by an alarm of a different sort -- blaring and high-pitched. Was it the SSR come to rescue her? She had wondered and maybe even prayed, but that was different from pinning her hopes high; she had faith in her colleagues and knew they wouldn't abandon her no matter how little they respected her as an agent, but she'd had to focus on her own survival. Now, however, with the alarm blaring, she desperately hoped that they were here to end this ordeal. She didn't hear shooting or shouting, which didn't mean that there wasn't any, but she also knew that the walls of her prison cell weren't as completely soundproof as she'd first thought and she allowed herself to worry that this was not a rescue and the SSR still didn't know where she was. After a week of keeping a stiff upper lip and hoping to be strong, she wasn't sure how she'd handle the disappointment. 

The longer the siren was the only sound, the more she wondered what was going on. Was the building on fire? Would they come get her if it was or would they leave her to burn? The door had no way to be opened from the inside; she'd seen it in the light and knew it for fact. 

There was something that sounded like an explosion, which could fit either scenario, and then some screaming that sounded more fearful than angry. A fire, then, in a place where nobody dared smoke. There was another explosion and then what was definitely machine gun fire and Peggy had no more time to speculate because the door to her cell flew open and the lights turned on and there were five burly men, two of whom were Gonzalez and Reitman, the latter of whom was carrying a black cloth sack and a large pistol. The sack was a hood and it was pulled over her head as her arms were yanked behind her and tied too tightly with something that bit into the flesh of her wrists. 

"Let's go," one of them said. "Before he gets down here."

Whoever was coming had nothing to do with the SSR; Dooley wouldn't countenance a solo adventure. So maybe this was an attack by an unknown third party and her being here was coincidence. Which was disappointing but not crushing. She would take the opportunity presented to her and make the best of it. She let her captors half-drag and half-guide her along the hallways, away from the noise and the smell of acrid smoke. She stepped on sharp bits of something and it hurt, but nobody slowed when she cried out in pain. Finally, they did stop while someone was trying to enter a combination to unlock a door, which they did not seem able to do, and as everyone's attention focused on that, she inched further away until she couldn't feel the proximity of her guards, and then she doubled over violently in an attempt to shake off the hood. It worked only partially, but partially was enough to see out of one eye completely and the other partially and so she could see where she ran as she retraced their steps. She'd rather face the mysterious attacker, who would hopefully not shoot someone in the captivity of his enemies, than risk getting taken further from where she might be found by her own people. 

She turned a corner too sharply and nearly slipped to the floor; her stockings were still mostly intact apart from holes at the big toes and she had no traction. Also, running with her hands bound behind her was much harder than she'd imagined it might be and it slowed her down even more. Her captors were in pursuit -- not all of them, but at least two -- and they had both proper attire and much longer legs and it would be a matter of when and not if they'd catch her. She barreled through a set of double doors shoulder first and heard the shouts close behind her, but she could see smoke and fire ahead and if she could get into that chaos, maybe she'd buy herself some distance. 

The rubble of an explosion was indeed good cover to hide, but stepping on burning bits of debris hurt like hell and it was hard to breathe where the smoke was thick enough to be useful. She pushed through, eyes watering and fighting for balance and breath, until the smoke started to thin out again, enough to see that the hallway in front of her was deserted. She ran, feet screaming with every step, but when she looked behind to see if anyone was following, she saw that she was leaving a trail of blood and soot for anyone to follow. 

"She's over there! Get her!" 

She ran, tears streaming down her face, toward an illuminated sign marked EXIT. She never made it, getting half tackled and half lifted up off the ground and she screamed at the frustration of it more than the pain. She kicked out wildly, but all it did was stub her toes and get her shoulders wrenched even further back. She was turned around and dragged back the way they'd come, her stockinged feet doing nothing to slow their progress. She screamed again, fury and pain given voice, and she was clouted on the back of her head to silence her, but it didn't. She kept screaming -- her throat was raw already from the smoke and chemicals -- if only to keep herself from crying as they went back into the smokiest part of the corridor. 

She didn't hear the first shot, didn't know that there had been a first shot, just that Gonzalez stumbled and nearly took them all down with him as he fell. Peggy wound up face-down in charred debris before she was dragged away, rolled over as she went so that her hands were pinned beneath her. The other one was bigger and burlier and he only needed one arm around her neck and one leg thrown over her thigh to keep her in place -- in front of him, as a shield. Chivalry had never been more dead.

The second shot she saw as a muzzle flash from a few feet away and she flinched, bracing for a pain that never came. The weight behind her and over her grew heavy and limp and it took a moment to realize why. She shimmied on her backside to get her head free of the lax hold, using her chin to knock the limp hand off of her face and kicking free to get out from underneath the dead weight of the corpse behind her. She rolled to her belly and then used her forehead to balance so that she could draw her feet up to kneel as a first step to standing, but that's where she froze because standing in front of her was a longhaired man with a metal arm and two rifles. It was too dark to see his features, but at this point, he could look like Gary Cooper or the Phantom of the Opera and she would not care. 

"I appreciate the assistance," she said with as much control as she could muster. Her voice was rough and raw and low and possibly not even audible. But she thought the mysterious attacker -- for who else could this be? -- could hear her. "But if I could impose on you once more to free my arms, I would be very grateful."

He didn't move for a long moment, long enough for her to wonder if he'd heard her after all or whether he'd understood or, if he understood, whether he planned to kill her after all. But then he shouldered one of the rifles and pulled a combat knife out of his belt and walked behind her. She felt two tugs and then her arms were loose and her shoulders protested vehemently at the freedom. She rolled them anyway, hissing at the pain, and moved to stand up. She was surprised to feel a gentle hand at her elbow to steady her, even more to see that the hand was chrome and not flesh. 

"Thank you," she said, but any quip she might have made died on her lips. Their proximity now that she was standing brought her close enough to see the man's face. See his _eyes_.

"Sergeant Barnes?" 


	2. Chapter 2

She felt a fool the moment the words came out of her mouth -- James Barnes had fallen from the train almost two years ago, half a world away -- but the man flinched, eyes going wide in what seemed like fear. "Is it really you?"

If it was Barnes... she felt overwhelmed at the idea. That he'd survived, that Steve had gone to his death not knowing that Barnes had survived -- did he even know that Steve was dead? And how could he be standing here? They'd focused more energy on reclaiming Barnes's body both after the mission and then after the war than anyone else's but Steve's. How could he have fallen off of a mountain and lived?

The metal hand holding her elbow might be just the start of the explanation. He let her go, but only to reach out to touch her face, stopping himself before he made contact and pulling his hand away. Like she was just as much a ghost to him as he was to her.

"Could ask you the same question," came the halting reply in what was definitely Barnes's voice. But the wondrous expression on his face disappeared, replaced by cold anger as he looked beyond her and raised the rifle in his right hand, firing it one-handed from the hip without difficulty even though she knew from personal experience how hard it was to accomplish safely, let alone with any accuracy.

"Can you run?" he asked her and she nodded; the rush of combat would keep her from feeling her feet for a while.

He gestured behind himself and she ran, hissing in pain as she did so and sensing more than hearing him follow behind her. She heard the gunshots, however, and the shouting at a distance.

"I don't know where I'm going!" she warned over her shoulder as she ran.

"Left," he called back, but just as she turned and saw a stairwell, she stepped on something sharp and stumbled. He scooped her up with one arm and threw her into a fireman's carry that was efficient if indecorous, and he ran up the stairs a few at a time. It was all dizzying and disconcerting, the fog of war and Barnes not only being alive, but also his carrying on as Steve once had, reckless and unstoppable, when he'd been nothing of the sort before.

He slowed at the top of the stairs and shifted her off of his shoulder and on to the landing, gesturing for her to shimmy back so that she was leaning against the door. He reached around and unstrapped the pack he'd been wearing on his shoulders -- she'd had her face mashed into it as they'd run -- and pulled out a roll of bandaging, tossing it to her along with a plastic bottle of water. "Take care of your feet," he told her, waiting for her to look up before handing over one of the rifles. "I'll be back in a minute. Shoot anything that moves."

She could do no more than squeak in protest before he turned around and went back downstairs. And so she multitasked, griping under her breath about the Commandos doing what they did best -- frustrate her and make spectacular messes -- while rinsing her feet free of debris before wrapping the left one, which was worse off. It turned out that the roll of bandaging was already halved, so she did both feet, stopping a few times to pick up the rifle when she heard noises that sounded like they could have been coming from below.

The rifle was a strange one, lighter and more compact than anything she'd ever seen either in battle or in Howard's toyroom. But the principle of it was the same and she kept her finger on the trigger guard as she waited for either trouble or Barnes, which might also be the same thing. She hoped he'd have some sort of signal so that she didn't shoot him by accident.

What was Barnes doing here? Or anywhere, for that matter? Why hadn't he returned home to his family? Why hadn't he let anyone know he'd survived? Was it because of how he'd done it? The metal arm hadn't been his own work, she was sure, but as for the rest... The long hair and ragged appearance and wild eyes spoke of life on the run with its hardships and privations, which was completely at odds with the strength and endurance she recognized as being more than simple adrenalin. It all hinted of a dark voyage, one that had led him here, wherever here was, to fight whoever these people were.

She heard footsteps on the stairs and brought the rifle up to her shoulder and looked through the sight... but then she heard a whistled tune and nearly dropped the weapon because that sequence of notes had once been _Steve_ 's signal.

Barnes appeared a moment later, running up the stairs. "Let's go," he urged. "Before it blows."

Peggy stood up -- her feet still hurt like hell, but it was bearable and, bandaged, they at least wouldn't get much worse -- and Barnes reached for the handle of the door behind her, gesturing for her to go first. He might have been acting out of courtesy, but she still had a rifle and had no idea what awaited them and so prepared for the worst.

What she got was not that, but no less startling. They were in a _bedroom_ , wooden dresser immediately to her left and a four-poster bed dominating the space. It was dark in the room and outside -- it was night through the curtained windows -- but she could see enough to be baffled by the ruffled bed dressing and floral duvet.

"What on earth?" she muttered as Barnes moved around her and pushed the dresser back in front of the door they'd just stepped through. He waited there and before she could ask what for, she heard a muffled explosion and the room itself rattled like an earthquake.

Barnes crossed to the bedroom's proper door with his rifle at the ready. He waited a beat before opening it, but then went through without pausing and Peggy had no choice but to follow.

The rest of the house was eerily quiet, if better lit. It was a farmhouse, at least by the decor, but there were also machines she didn't recognize and those were probably tied to whatever hellish business went on underneath.

The first body was in the kitchen entryway, prone and bloody. There were probably a dozen more that she saw before Barnes brought her back to the kitchen and she knew without asking that he had killed all of them. It didn't bother her; these were clearly people up to no good and they'd held her prisoner for however long and they all seemed to have been armed. But even if they hadn't... maybe it was just seeing Barnes again that put her back in the wartime mindframe. Maybe she'd never gotten out of that mindframe in the first place.

She jumped up and sat on the counter, which was black stone and looked more like a lab table, but it got her off of her feet. Barnes pulled the body in the entry out of view and then went to a large cupboard that turned out to be an refrigerator and sorted through the contents, opening containers that looked like they could be scientific samples and sniffed them before bringing them over to a machine with a door and tapping the face so that it beeped. He returned to the refrigerator and Peggy couldn't stand it anymore.

"How are you here?" she as he continued to rummage. "How did you... How are you _here_ , Sergeant?"

Barnes made a noise that might've been laughter. "The fall didn't kill me," he finally said, not turning to look at her. "I wish to God it had."

She sensed that this was not the time to either ask for details or suggest that he shouldn't think that way. Whatever he'd been through had been a lot and she'd understood in a way she hadn't during the war how it could simply be too much. The soldiers never wanted to talk about what they'd seen, the survivors from the concentration camps hid their experiences along with their tattoos and scars, and she'd learned to keep quiet herself as much for her current employment as because she'd rather enjoyed her war up until Steve had died and understood that to have been the exception.

 _Steve_. What would he do if he were standing here, knowing that his brother in all but blood still lived? More than she could, no doubt. Or perhaps far less.

"We looked," she said forcefully as Barnes emerged from the refrigerator with a bag of oranges. "We looked for years. We still _are_ looking, although I suppose we can quietly tell the Army to stop without too much fuss being as you're here foraging for supper."

The machine Barnes had put the samples in beeped, startling her. She had no idea what it did, although he seemed to.

"I know," he said, standing up after putting the oranges in his pack. He looked like he was about to say something else, but then he reconsidered. "What's the last date that you remember?"

Peggy felt a jolt of fear. "How long have I been missing?" she asked instead of answering his question. "The people downstairs thought I would remember events from 1949, which I thought was absurd, but..."

But what if she'd somehow been missing for years instead of days? It made no sense on the face of it, not when she was wearing the same clothes she'd put on in 1946 and her physical appearance hadn't changed beyond growing more disheveled as her imprisonment had progressed. But so much else of what she'd experienced during her captivity was strange enough to be explained by the passage of time -- plastic water bottles, the clothes of her captors, the label on the can of tinned meat sitting next to her on the countertop -- that she couldn't rule it out. She'd chased HYDRA for the better part of five years and knew that blaster weapons and supersoldiers had only been the tip of their creative iceberg. And HYDRA hadn't been the only Nazi element experimenting on prisoners in the most macabre ways, simply the most inventive.

"The freezing tube!" she gasped. "Was I--"

The freezing tube had been mostly a rumor, but a fairly substantiated one because it had come from Zola himself. Who had told them of a device Schmidt had been working on that would freeze, store, and then defrost mice without killing them, although apparently it had killed anything larger, such as cats. The device was the size of a breadbox, Zola had said, but Schmidt had been working on one large enough to hold a man. They hadn't found it when they'd raided his base, but they hadn't found a lot of things in the aftermath, including the man standing before her.

Barnes made the same noise as earlier, a rusty laugh that had nothing to do with being amused. "You weren't in the cryo tube," he told her with bleak authority. "But you aren't in the Forties anymore, either."

Her stomach flipped. "What's today's date, Sergeant?" she asked in a whisper, putting her hands down on either side of her to steady herself. Even if it was only 1950 (only!), she'd still have been gone four years. Would the SSR still be looking for her or would they have written her off as dead? Would her family have buried an empty coffin? 

"Exact date, I'm not sure," Barnes said, crossing over to her. "But it's April 2015 and you are far from home."

She must have swayed because Barnes reached out to steady her, but she didn't feel it. She didn't feel anything but shock as she looked around as if there were something here that would prove Barnes a liar. But all she could see was the man in front of her.

"If I'm in the future," she said in what she hoped was some kind of even voice, "why aren't I old? Why aren't _you_?"

She was clutching Barnes's metal arm, something she didn't realize until he shook with bitter laughter. "You, HYDRA dragged though time. Me? Let's just go with 'the cryo tube worked' for now."

Which was a terrible answer as well as none at all now that she had no context for anything, unmoored in time as she was.

He made sure she wasn't going to topple before turning back to the beeping box, opening it up to reveal not samples, but food. He handed one container, now hot, to her and a fork and she saw that it was lasagna. She had no appetite whatsoever, even though her stomach was rumbling at the smell.

"Eat," Barnes exhorted, taking his own container, which had something unrecognizable and exotic-smelling in it. "I can't promise you too many more hot meals."

She ate mechanically and with growing hunger; at least her body was still familiar in that respect -- at least something was. When the container was empty, she set it aside and sat there, digesting her meal as well as everything else. The lasagna sat more easily than the notion that she was seventy years in the future, transported by an unknown method and with no way to get home. Or that Barnes had apparently been around all along.

She watched him as he ate, looking to find what was different and what was the same from the man she'd once known. The James Barnes of her memories had been partially obscured by the official Army portraits that had come attached to the files she'd compiled since he'd fallen, a jauntily-smiling, neatly-pressed young man who'd not yet seen the horrors of war. But here, now, _in the future_ , she could remember how he'd really been. The hair was strange and the arm a terrible marvel, but the rest... the rest was not that foreign. Sergeant Barnes had led by example in garrison when it came to grooming, but she'd gotten used to him freshly returned from missions with the stubble and grime that came with living rough and choosing to push for home instead of sticking around and boiling water for a shave. And she remembered his eyes, the way they'd follow everything and everyone (and especially Steve) and how, when he'd been too tired to keep up the pretense, they'd show everything he'd wanted to hide. 

Barnes felt her staring and looked up, but she didn't turn away. She was too rattled to be mindful of her manners, but he didn't glare back. Instead, he gave her a sort of weak smile, like maybe he understood her confusion. He'd been surprised to see her, too. 

"How long do you think you've been here?" he asked between bites, reaching over to pick up a water bottle, offering it to her. She took it and he picked up another for himself. She'd learned that the bottles had caps that twisted off with enough force; the water was warmish, but it was also wet and that was all that mattered. 

"I'm not any kind of certain," she admitted. "More than a few days, but perhaps less than a week. Time lost its meaning down there."

Barnes chuffed out a laugh. "Yeah, it does at that."

There was more to that remark, but she didn't have the energy to pursue it. "As for the how, I know not a thing. One minute I'm skulking about a naval base, the next I'm waking up in a prison cell in what turns out to be the future."

Barnes set his empty container aside. "I think I know how," he told her, wiping his mouth with the back of his metal hand. "But it won't help you get back."

He pushed off the counter he'd been leaning against and bent down to pick up the pack at his feet. Peggy slipped down from her perch and nearly collapsed as she landed on feet she'd managed to forget had been so abused. Barnes reached out to steady her and she held on, letting him pick her up and put her back on the countertop with an ease that was both unnatural and heartbreakingly familiar for it. She knew that she could close her eyes and she'd see Steve, looking at her with a shy smile and hungry eyes, after he'd swept her up on top of a map table so that she'd be eye-level. Easier to kiss, he'd always said, as if it had purely been a matter of practicality. But Steve wasn't here and she couldn't stand the memory right now, however often it had sustained her in the past. A past that was suddenly much further away. As was her present, or what had been her present, and here she was in a future that was a mystery of such daunting proportions that she felt her gorge rise. She reached for the water bottle, draining it.

"What size shoe are you?" Barnes asked and she answered, knowing why he was asking. She wasn't bothered by the idea of wearing a dead man's shoes any more than she'd not cared about eating in a house full of corpses. Once upon a time, she'd seen the Commandos routinely come back wearing kit they hadn't gone out with. Once upon a time, she'd sat and drank cognac with Gabe Jones and Jacques Dernier not fifty feet from a burned-out Panzer with the soldiers still lying cooked inside. War skewed things. Being kidnapped into the future skewed things even more.

She heard a faint thump, then another one, and Barnes returned a minute later carrying a pair of boots that didn't quite fit but were probably the best that could be done. Once upon a time, there had been nobody better at making do than the first team sergeant of the Howling Commandos.

"Will I be so very noticeable out there?" she asked as she double-knotted the laces. Out there, in the wide world of the future. Of the next _century_. Where beeping boxes cooked food and Barnes walked around with one sleeve on his shirt. Was that an affectation because of the arm or the normal fashion? The science fiction stories that took place in the far future had always been so ridiculous and bizarre. 

He looked her over critically, as if he had to consider the answer. "Probably, but nothing that you'll have to worry about where you're going." 

She slipped down from the counter more carefully this time; it still hurt to land on her feet, but after that it was a much more bearable pain, one that she knew would fade the longer she kept the boots on. 

"Where are we going?" she asked once she'd fixed her skirt and shouldered her rifle. God, she reeked. She hoped wherever they were going had a bath to soak in. "For that matter, where are we now?" 

"We're outside of Havre de Grace, Maryland," he answered, his expression mocking the sanctimony of the name. "And we're going to upstate New York."

She wanted to ask what was in upstate New York that was of relevance -- he'd said he knew how she'd gotten to the future, so perhaps this was how to get back? -- but Barnes picked up his pack again and his rifle and led her through the house, not the way they'd come from the bedroom but a different route that led to a back door that opened on to a wooden deck. There were two bodies visible in the moonlight, lying prone with puddles of blood beneath them. Throats slit by a knife, no doubt. 

The night was dark and quiet, the sort of quiet she'd remembered from her childhood as being peaceful and relaxed, as opposed to the tense, wary silence of wartime London at night. Barnes led her through a horse paddock that hadn't seen any horses recently and toward a copse of trees. They didn't enter the trees, instead walking parallel with the treeline. He held up a fist to signal to her that she should halt in place and, a long moment later, she saw headlights through the trees and heard a car pass by at speed. Cars were much quieter now, it seemed, since she'd barely heard the engine as it had sped by. Maybe it was a flying car; maybe Howard had figured it out. 

Barnes's car, when they came to it, looked almost like a toy. It gleamed silver in the moonlight and was small and sleek and Peggy accidentally slammed the door with some force because car doors were apparently much lighter now. 

"They're all plastic now," Barnes said when she apologized. "Put on the seat belt."

He gestured toward her right shoulder when she looked at him blankly and when she turned, she saw a buckle. She pulled, following his hand gestures to bring the belt around her front and attach it to the buckle's mate on her left.

"The future's got all kinds of safety laws now and the car is stolen," he explained as he fastened his own harness. "They see us without, they can pull us over just for that and I don't exactly have a valid license or registration."

The car did not fly, but it came to life with a quiet purr and rode with much more comfort and less jostling around than any vehicle she'd ever been in. The dashboard was illuminated in the dark, a ghostly greenish glow that made it look more like it belonged in a lab than on a road. A set of numbers said 2:24 and she wondered if that was the time or if it meant something else until it showed 2:25 a moment later.

There were no other cars on the road, which was a one-lane-each-way stretch of tree-lined asphalt over rolling hills, so if she looked out the window and ignored the hum of the car and the presence of the man driving it, she could almost pretend that this was all a strange dream. But it wasn't and the reminder of that made her stomach turn.

She turned her attention to Barnes, who kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and said not a word despite him obviously realizing that she was staring at him.

Once upon a time, Barnes had been Steve's brother in all but blood, his enabler and his conscience, his trusted right hand and, when the need had called, his dirty left. Away from the field, he'd covered for Steve, which meant he'd covered for Peggy, and he'd never been a bastard about it, not even once.

The two of them had been allies back in the day for more reasons than a mutual fondness for Steve Rogers, friendly if not necessarily friends, although she'd thought the two of them would have eventually become that after the war. But there hadn't been any after the war for him... except there had been. And he seemed to resent it deeply. Whatever he'd experienced -- and she hadn't forgotten that he'd said that he'd been in the freezing tube -- since his fall from the train had not been kind or gentle to him.

Sergeant Barnes of the Howling Commandos had been clever and charming. But the man who sat next to her now bore little resemblance to the one who'd discreetly worked his way through half the ATS personnel assigned to London without needing to rely on being Captain America's closest friend. He looked damaged and destroyed even as he looked physically tremendous, metal arm or not.

"What happened to you?" she asked before she lost the courage to do so or regained the wisdom to hold her tongue.

He didn't answer and she didn't expect him to, but she didn't apologize or withdraw the question, either. She returned her focus to the passing scenery -- trees, still, with the odd farmhouse hidden behind a horse paddock or cow pasture. They passed through intersections every once in a while, brightly lit and _foreign_ and then fading into the rear once the light turned green.

"The fall didn't kill me," he said almost too quietly to hear, but she didn't dare ask him to speak more loudly. "HYDRA found me and then Schmidt found me and then Zola finished what he'd started."

"Zola?" She turned in her seat, surprised. "But--"

It was the timing rather than the topic -- she'd known all along that Zola had experimented on Barnes before Steve had rescued him. But when she'd left 1946, Zola had been living under a bizarre sort of house arrest in Idaho along with several other high-profile HYDRA scientists, to be milked for information by the government like a prized herd of cows. His days of torturing others should have been over for good.

"The war didn't go like you thought it went," Barnes went on in the same soft voice, eyes still on the road. "The Axis lost, but the Allies didn't win. And HYDRA didn't lose."

What followed was both soothsaying and nightmare, a tale of a future-turned-past that went horribly, horribly wrong. Barnes told her of HYDRA's dormancy and rise as a secret power, of how it had maneuvered both sides of the US-Soviet conflict for its own gain, how it had come close to fulfilling Schmidt's dream of a new world order without anyone even realizing that it still existed. And how they had used the asset codenamed Winter Soldier to do it, a killing machine too precious to be allowed to wither with age or grow soft with personal attachment, a weapon honed to perfection by time and then by technology.

"I'm not that man anymore," Barnes assured her, as if she needed to hear it. "I'm not that _thing_."

"I didn't think you were," she replied quickly, because she hadn't. She hadn't cared back in the underground prison, but now, now she knew it for herself. This was not Sergeant Barnes, who'd pretend to tug on his forelock when she'd give him an order. But this was someone who could have once been him, who'd saved her and fed her and shod her and even if he was mostly a stranger -- and a terrifying one at that -- she didn't feel unsafe around him.

He laughed bitterly when she told him that.

"I was sent to kill you twice," he told her, finally looking over. He saw the surprise she knew was on her face. "The first time it was countermanded at the last hour. The second time you knew it was coming and I couldn't complete the mission within acceptable parameters."

He'd been sent to kill Director Margaret Carter of SHIELD, the successor of the SSR and the agency she would apparently head for the better part of four decades.

"What a hollow victory," she marveled, unable to even process the information, like it was another Margaret Carter and another SSR and another universe far from this one. It sounded no less bizarre coming out of Barnes's mouth than it had when her captors had said it, but it was far more horrifying now because she knew it to be real. "To get what I wished for at such a cost I'd never want to pay. To be such a figurehead, to think I was changing the world for the better when all I was really doing was dancing to HYDRA's tunes like a marionette..."

This time, the bitterness of Barnes's laugh required no translation. He knew, in ways too depraved for her to imagine, exactly how that worked.

She thought about Steve, about what he would have thought of all this, to see what had happened to his dearest friend, to see how his incredible sacrifice had ultimately been for nothing. He'd given up his everything -- he'd given up _her_ \-- in the belief that it would be the final act needed to secure a victory over HYDRA. But that sacrifice had been in vain, a wonderful soul extinguished for _nothing_. And she'd apparently helped salt the ashes of the failure with her own stupidity and ineptitude and, if she knew herself at all, her ego.

"Pull over," she said suddenly, feeling the bile rise. "Pull over!"

They were on a major roadway now, several lanes in each directions and plenty of cars, many of which honked their bleating-sheep horns as Barnes gunned the engine and got them over to the shoulder on the right. He braked to a sharp stop and she fumbled with the buckle of the safety harness and then the door's recessed handle and barely made it out of the car before she started to heave.

By the time she was done, she was on her knees, gravel cutting into her skin, and Barnes was behind her, close enough to sense but not to touch. He waited for her to announce her finale by bursting into tears that quickly became wracking sobs before crouching down and putting a hand on her shoulder for a moment before picking her up, as easily as he had earlier, and carrying her away from where she'd been ill. He carried her as a child this time, and she let her forehead rest against his neck as she wept, unable to stop and angry that she couldn't stop and that she was cursed with this horrible revelation about her own future and its failures and that she had failed so spectacularly, betraying the memory and actions of the man she loved and consigning how many to needless deaths -- or fates worse than death?

"I'm sorry," she said between hiccuping gasps. She didn't know if he could hear her; her voice was shot and the cars whizzing by were loud. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Barnes said as he opened the car's rear passenger door with one hand and placed her gently on the seat. "You've had a long day."

She made a noise of frustration. "I have, but that's not it," she tried to explain. "I'm sorry for my part in what happened to you. For not knowing, for not _realizing_ , for leaving you there to--"

"Hey," he cut her off with enough sharpness to pierce through her fog of misery. "You didn't have a part in what happened to me. You didn't miss anything and you didn't leave me anywhere. You weren't supposed to know about HYDRA or about me, and if you had found out, they'd have killed you. And it wouldn't have been worth it. Trust me, I was in a position to know."

He left her alone then, but only to get a bottle of water for her, exhorting her to 'swish and spit' before she drank anything. When she was feeling steady enough, she got back out of the car and walked in the opposite direction from where she'd vomited, hardly feeling her feet as she stumbled. Barnes kept close, closer than she wanted him to be at the moment, but she was on the side of a highway and he understood the dangers of it better than she did. She understood nothing of this time and place, only that she'd enabled its near-destruction and she forced herself to think of other things so she didn't start crying again... but she had nothing else to think about. What else was there? The places and people she'd left behind in the past? Should she ask Barnes if he knew if Angie Martinelli became a movie star?

She took a deep breath and then another and then another and then she turned to Barnes and nodded. "Let's go, wherever we're going."

"Where we're going can wait until tomorrow," she heard him say as she went back to the car and sat in the passenger seat and re-did the seat harness. "Can't hand you over like this."

She'd have been insulted were it not the truth. She'd managed to add vomit and tears to a bedraggled cocktail of sweat and urine and char and blood. She probably looked like an escaped lunatic in her ruined -- and very dated -- dress and ill-fitting soldier's boots. No wonder Barnes had stayed close to her as she'd stomped around on the highway shoulder. 

"Hand me over to whom?" she asked as he got into the car. She didn't think it would be another set of villains, but she had to wonder what sort of people Barnes considered allies. 

He made a face as if he didn't want to answer. "Decent people," he finally settled on. "Howard Stark's kid has a crew of do-gooders. They're the ones cleaning up HYDRA now, more or less."

She turned to him. " _Howard_?" 

It wasn't as if she couldn't imagine Howard with children; he was cheerfully irresponsible and would screw anything that stood still long enough, but she thought he expected to settle down at some point and get on with the business of securing his legacy. It was just... that had been far in the future until a few days ago. And now it was far enough in the past for his child to be sponsoring a private army. 

"His boy's just like him," Barnes said with what could almost be amusement. 

"Is Howard..." she trailed off. She regretted the question immediately. She didn't want to know when everyone she knew had died. 

"I killed Howard and his wife on a snowy road in Maryland twenty-five years ago," Barnes answered, the light in his eyes darkening. "Howard recognized me, but I didn't know who _I_ was, let alone who he was except my target. It was set up to look like an accident - I'm not sure anyone outside of HYDRA actually knows it wasn't. They thought they were solving a problem; they didn't realize that they'd created a bigger one down the line." 

She didn't know if he meant himself or Howard's son. She hadn't imagined any of the Winter Soldier's victims, even as he'd given her names and positions they'd held. Faceless victims in a war some of them had never known they'd been fighting in and better they stay that way for her own peace of mind and for Barnes's, since it was clear he remembered it all. But _Howard_ … she'd seen people she cared about die in front of her too many times, but the guilt she felt over, say, Abe Erskine's death was abstract and possibly self-serving. Barnes's guilt over Howard's death wasn't abstract, it was very literal, however complicated the circumstances. The blood on his hands hadn't been a euphemism. Howard and Barnes had gotten on, once upon a time, better than Steve and Howard had. They hadn't been _friends_ , but they had been friendly and they'd enjoyed each other's sense of humor and now Barnes had to live with the knowledge that he'd murdered someone with whom he'd once shared cigarettes and dirty jokes. And who had recognized his killer and wondered why. 

She wondered how Barnes carried that weight. She didn't even have the fortitude to bear hearing about what she would do, let alone carry the memories of those deeds once they were done. 

There were blue-and-white signs along the side of the road advertising rest areas and motels and, at one of them, Barnes took the exit. The motel looked like anything that might have carried then name in 1946 with very little difference beyond the font of the signage and the style of cars parked in the lot. Barnes told her to wait while he registered; he reached behind his seat to pull out a jacket that had a glove tucked into the pocket. 

"Wait," she called to him before he closed the door. She held up her left hand to show off her naked ring finger. "I don't have anything to use."

Barnes chuckled. "Don't worry. Nobody needs that anymore. Anything goes now. _Anything_."

He was still smiling at her reaction as he headed off toward the motel management office. He had left the keys in the ignition and she pushed the button that said 'radio' to see what happened. But nothing did happen, just static, and there were no knobs to cruise for a station. There were buttons that were titled 'tune' and had what could possibly be considered abstract up and down arrows, so presumably they took the place of the knob, but she turned it off instead. What would she hear? News that made no sense? Music like the growling racket her captors had blasted in her cell? She didn't want that, didn't want any more reminders that she had left everything she'd known far behind. 

At past-three in the morning, there was no activity in the lot and very little to look at, but she couldn't close her eyes no matter how tired she was. She was alone, however temporarily, without any understanding of her environment or money or identification and she was well aware that she looked like a crime victim. She _was_ a crime victim. She stayed vigilant until she saw Barnes approach with keys in his gloved hand. 

She had nothing to bring with her; Barnes had only his pack. The room was clean and bare and apart from the glowing clock and the gigantic television, it was close enough to familiar to keep her from panicking. There were two beds and she was unsurprised that Barnes dropped his pack on the bed closer to the door before doing a sweep of the room. Finding it secure, he went back to his pack and dug through it, emptying the oranges from earlier onto the bed. 

"I can't get you anything to wear until the morning," he began as he held out a rolled-up parcel that turned out to be a mildly wrinkled button-down shirt. "If you want to wash your things in the shower for now." 

The next thing he handed her was a pair of boxers he assured her had not been worn since their last washing. She blushed slightly but accepted them, knowing from experience that Steve's shirts hadn't been long enough on her for any kind of modesty -- not that that had been the purpose -- and Barnes was still, she presumed, an inch or two shorter. She'd seen men in their pants often enough during the war, she'd seen Barnes in his pants once or twice, but it was still awkward to be handed those pants. 

The bathroom was not hard to figure out, even without the signs and instructions on how to use everything from the shower to the toilet. (To be fair, the toilet's instructions were mostly interdictions and not how-tos.) She'd taken off the boots in the bedroom, but did not strip any further before turning on the water and unwrapping the tiny bar of soap. She sat on the edge of the tub with only her legs under the spray and watched the dirt and blood stream down the drain before carefully unwrapping the bandages on her feet and then stripping off her stockings. Which were tattered, but would be salvageable if she had to wear them again, especially under the bandages, and so she let them pool on the tub floor under the spray. She stood up carefully and stripped off each article of clothing in turn, adding them to the sodden pile. There were little bottles of shampoo and hair conditioner and she applied one and then the other in between soaping herself up twice. She felt marginally more human as she turned off the water, wrapping herself in towels before sitting again on the side of the tub and using the rest of the tiny soap bar to scrub her clothes to some marginal degree of cleanliness. She wrung them out by hand and then inside the towels and dressed herself in Barnes's clothes, pretending not to notice the familiarity to dressing in a lover's cast-offs to go make tea. With no curlers to hand, she plaited her hair so there'd at least be waves once it dried. 

There were colorful hangers in the closet and she draped her clothes over them, spreading them out to give them air and resisting the urge to close the door on them. They'd dry faster this way and it would be ridiculous to go through such motions to hide her foundation garments while she was wearing Barnes's pants. 

She still felt a bit naked, although Barnes didn't do more than look her over with a critical eye toward her health. She wondered if he saw her as his best friend's girl still, or simply as she saw him, a welcome familiar face in a world of strangers. She slid into the bed left for her and pulled the covers up high. 

"You said you knew how I got here," she began carefully. "Does this also mean you know how to get me back?"

Barnes, who was sitting at the small table cleaning his pistols, looked up. "In theory, yeah. In practice, not so easy. The device they used, the device I came to take from them, is a one-time-only kinda thing. They have a couple of others, I know that, but I don't know where they are. Stark can probably find them for you faster than I can or he can maybe rig his own."

She needed a beat to remember that he meant Howard's son and not Howard. But then the rest of what he'd said struck. "What were you going to use the device for?" 

She knew the answer and the look he gave her said that he knew she knew it, too. 

"I'm not much good here," he said quietly as he turned his attention back to reassembling his pistols. "All I see is the damage I've caused. All most everyone else sees in me is the same and there are plenty of folks looking for me, either to punish me for what I did or to put me back to work to do more. I can't fix anything here. I can't make up for what I did. I can only make things worse. But if I go back, I can maybe change things enough that I never do those things in the first place."

She wanted to offer comfort or wisdom, something to reward this honesty she knew had required bravery to reveal. This wasn't something he'd told anyone, she suspected, not out loud in words. She wanted to tell him not to shoulder HYDRA's blame or to place himself beyond redemption; he'd told her enough to make it clear he hadn't had much freedom of choice at all during his indenture to HYDRA. But she also understood that those would be meaningless expressions because she understood his guilt, even to a far lesser degree that was still somewhere closer to empathy than sympathy. He'd told her enough for her to imagine her own future (past!) failures everywhere she looked, too. 

"Will nobody miss you?" She asked instead. He'd said that Howard's son would find the device for her, which she took to mean that the offer was not open to him. Which in turn made her wonder how good these do-gooders could be -- or how unsafe Barnes's plan really was -- if he could not turn to them for himself but thought they'd help her. 

The pained look he quickly hid put the lie to the words that followed. "Only in theory," he said. "The idea of James Buchanan Barnes, hero of World War II, is a lot nicer than the reality of what actually happened to him. And they'd get that one back in the exchange."

"What?" she exclaimed, sitting up. 

"The device isn't a time machine like in the stories," he explained with an embarrassed shrug. "You can't just use it to go where you want. You can only use it to swap places with yourself, so you can only go to a time where you're alive. If I go back to before I fell, then that's the Bucky Barnes who shows up in 2015, the one with two arms and a much shorter list of sins."

Going back to 1944 would give him a chance to stop HYDRA for real, perhaps. "You'd scare the daylights out of Steve. And me, too. And the boys. And everyone else, while you were at it."

Barnes laughed, rusty and genuine and he seemed surprised at the noise. 

Going back to 1944 would give him a chance to save Steve and she couldn't imagine that hadn't been part of his reasoning to justify what was clearly an incredible risk. The HYDRA who'd dragged her forward in time hadn't had enough control of the device to get the 'right' Peggy Carter; Barnes could miss his destination and wind up already the Winter Soldier -- or still a child. 

"If I'm still alive in this time," she wondered, since that had been an unspoken conclusion, "then are people looking for me?" 

Barnes shrugged. "I didn't know you -- the 2015 you -- had been missing, but obviously you had been and so, yeah, people are looking. Stark is looking, I'm sure. And probably half the US Government because Director Carter has a lot of secrets to keep."

She wondered what the nonogenarian version of herself thought of being back in 1946. Poor Sousa would be in for a shock.

"Well," she mused as she slid back down and pulled the covers up again. "I'm sure my appearance tomorrow will put some minds at ease, then, if not my own."

She fell asleep almost without realizing it, closing her eyes for what felt like a moment and waking up to daylight and Barnes looming over her.

"I'm going to go get clothes and food," he told her. "You can go back to sleep for a while, it's still pretty early and we're nowhere anyone will find us."

Groggy, she made a noise to indicate that she'd heard and he chuckled and disappeared from her field of vision. She heard the door open and close and lock a moment later and fully intended to get up, but she also could see that while the other bed was neatly made, it had also been slept in. Which meant that Barnes had not been up all night sitting a watch and that meant more than his words had, now that she was awake enough to register them. So she let herself fall back asleep because in her dreams, she was not seventy years in the future, on the run from the failures she'd yet to commit. 

Which did not mean that she didn't spring alert and reach for the pistol Barnes had left on the nightstand when she heard the door rattle almost two hours later. But it was only Barnes, carrying blue and white bags labeled Walmart. Inside the bags was everything from milk to ammunition to a cellophane-wrapped package of brightly-colored ladies' knickers. Barnes had bought fruit and prepared food as well as toiletries and a variety of what seemed to be both men's and ladies' garments. He'd even bought her two brassieres, for which she'd given him a look and he'd returned it with an insouciance she remembered from long ago, the kind that said that he probably hadn't even had to look at the one drying in the closet to know what size. 

"Is there a hat in the other bag?" she asked as she laid out the coat he'd purchased, a black cloth piece with toggle buttons that didn't seem to be cut for a woman at all. 

"Nobody wears hats anymore," Barnes answered as he emptied the bags that contained food. "Well, they do, but for effect and not by custom."

He held up a pair of caps with what she recognized as the Yankees' logo. 

"You wouldn't dare," she accused. Howard's latent interest in the Giants had always become much more active if either Barnes or Steve had been around to make fun of them for their affection for the Dodgers, but all three of them could unite against Greenberg and his attachment to the Yankees. 

"A fox in sheep's clothing," he agreed. "But it's the best camouflage; you wear a Phillies cap, people might think you're a Phillies fan and you'll stand out anywhere except Philadelphia. You wear a Yankees cap, no guarantee you know anything about baseball and you're probably wearing it to look sharp."

There was one bag he kept to himself and she didn't ask what was in it, although she was curious. Instead, she took her newly acquired possessions to the bathroom and sorted out what she'd try on and what she'd need to make herself up for the day. Barnes had been thoughtful and had judged sizes and colors with an eye toward what would look decent on her as well as what would be appropriate in this day and age. She remembered that he'd had sisters before he'd ever had a string of conquests and felt for him anew; was any of his family still alive? Was he an uncle -- or a great-uncle -- many times over? She might ask later. For now, she dressed in what he'd bought her, the underclothes and then a long-sleeved cotton top with a scooped neck that felt a little risqué for daywear without a scarf and a pair of denim trousers that were a little loose at the waist but quite form-fitting in the legs. The brassieres were an unusual style, much more... naturalistic than the one she'd brought from 1946 and it added to her feeling of strangeness and nakedness. The makeup could wait until after she'd eaten, as could the toothbrush, but not the antiperspirant, which promised to smell of baby freshness and yet did not smell like any clean baby she'd ever been in proximity to. 

"I don't know what to do with my hair," she admitted as she stepped out, feeling both more and less embarrassed than she had wandering around in his pants and shirt. "I have some pins left, but I wouldn't know where to stick them."

Barnes was pouring milk into tall pink glasses, but he looked up when she spoke. He nodded at her outfit, then shrugged. "There's not much expected now of how people dress or wear their hair. You can leave it down. It'd draw less attention than victory rolls or anything elaborate."

The idea of wandering around outside with her hair undressed struck her as too odd to follow, especially already dressed in what felt like a costume meant to draw the wrong sort of attention. So she put it in a simple chignon, for which she had barely enough pins and had to leave wisps of hair free at the front. 

Their meal was simple, sandwiches and milk and fruit. After they'd finished, Barnes rooted through what he'd bought for himself to wear and then handed her the last package on his way to the bathroom to change. 

"It's not how I should do it," he said apologetically. "And I'm sorry for that in advance. But I don't know how to do it so that it doesn't hurt. Either of us."

She was struck by the sadness in his face and wanted to ask what he could possibly have a harder time telling her than what he'd already had to, but he didn't give her the chance, striding off to the bathroom and closing the door. 

Inside the bag were two children's books, big and colorful and with large print. The first was titled _The Story of Captain America_ and had illustrations of Steve on the cover, the first as how he'd looked before the serum, in street clothes, the second as he had during the war, and the third almost identical to it but with minor alterations to the costume and the cowl on. The second was _The Avengers and the Battle of New York_ and had a collection of what looked like pulp characters on the cover, except one of them was a cowled Captain America in yet another version of the costume, all set with the Manhattan skyline behind them and horror-comic alien creatures floating in the sky. 

She heard the shower start up as she opened the book about Steve; she figured this was Barnes's way of breaking it to her that there was a new Captain America. By the time Barnes emerged from the bathroom, clean and clean-shaven, she knew differently and could barely speak for the weeping. 

"I'm sorry," Barnes said as he came around to where she was sitting on the end of her bed. He threw his things carelessly on his bed and crouched down before her so that he could look at her face and she met his eyes, which were not dry. "I'll take you to him today."

It took all of her willpower and all of her energy to say the next words. "Don't. Please don't."

Steve was here, as young and vital as he'd been when he'd di-- when he'd _crashed_. He was hours away, so close she could almost smell his aftershave, and she wanted nothing more than to be in his arms again. But how could she? 

"Carter," Barnes began, clearing his throat. "You have nothing to be afraid of. It's _Steve_. Believe me, he is the same as he ever was."

There was meaning in those words and any other time, she'd ask about it, but right now she had another question. "Then why aren't you with him?"

If Steve was alive and himself, then he would have been breaking down HYDRA's doors with Barnes if given a ghost of a chance. And if circumstances had prevented it, then Barnes would have contacted him last night. Or this morning. Barnes would have told her right away, reunited them right away, instead of looking for a way to speak of miracles he couldn't believe in. 

"Because I'm the Winter Soldier and he deserves Bucky Barnes," came the answer. "He chose to _die_ instead of not save Bucky Barnes and I can't be that man for him anymore. If I'd gotten to go back to '44, I could have given him that man in my place. But I can't shackle him with who I am now. I'm covered in blood and he'd still drop everything for me and I can't let him."

"And I can't let him, either," she told Barnes, meeting his gaze, watery eyes to watery eyes. "I can't let him forgive me for what I can't forgive myself any more than you can."

She'd thought of this as Barnes had told her of her future and his past. How similar they were, how they both set their moral compasses so that Steve was their true north no matter where -- or when -- they'd wandered off the path. She hadn't committed her sins yet and Barnes's sins were not truly his own, but the guilt still kept them both from believing that they deserved Steve's unflagging loyalty and unwavering heart.

"Carter--"

"Don't 'Carter' me, Sergeant," she cut him off sharply. "Just because what I've done is still in my future doesn't change history. It doesn't change that I pissed away his sacrifice, that I played dollhouse with the world instead of realizing what was under my nose, that I wasn't enough of a threat to HYDRA that they didn't try harder to finish the job of killing me. 

"I might've thought I was saving the world, but what I was was a proud peacock in a gilded cage and while every bone in my body is screaming to run to him, I have to go back and fix the mess I've made. For him, for you, for Howard, for everyone else HYDRA will destroy because _I wasn't good enough_."

It had been bothering her since he'd told her about Howard and then that she was still alive in this time. The Winter Soldier had twice been sent after Director Carter, but in the end it had been deemed not worth the effort. _She_ hadn't been worth the effort or the collateral damage - and these were the same people who'd killed Howard's wife to make it look like Howard's death had been an accident. Considering how important Director Carter would allegedly become, it was a devastating critique. She'd been harmless in place, so they'd let her be. Which meant that she had failed her profession, she had failed the man she had loved, she had failed on every level that mattered and the realization was breathtaking. 

Barnes stood up, startling her, and walked toward the window before turning back and returning to her. "I wasn't lying about Stark being able to find another way for you to get home faster than I could."

She reached for another tissue and blew her nose. "If I go to Tony Stark, it's as good as going to Steve."

And if she were in the same room as Steve, she'd never go. She'd listened to him _die_ and she hadn't stopped missing him for a day since then and that he was alive and well and young in the future... She'd be powerless against him. She'd accept his love and his forgiveness and she'd be seduced by the fantasy like in a Greek myth and she'd never leave him. She wouldn't be able to. She wouldn't _want_ to. And she had to. 

Once upon a time, Steve had chosen to save the many over his own happiness. Here and now, she had to do the same. 

"If you're going to keep protesting, I will offer you a deal," she said when Barnes looked like he was winding up to speak. "If you want me to go to Steve, you have to come with me. Either both of us go to him or neither of us do. You want to go back to make things better for him and so you can sleep at night. So do I."

He glared at her and she thought she had the strength to hold up against it, but she wasn't sure. Sergeant Barnes, yes, she had and she could. But he was right, he wasn't just Bucky Barnes anymore and he couldn't quite hide who he'd become afterward. But whatever effect he'd been going for was undone with an annoyed sniffle and a sigh as he reached for the tissue box she held out to him. 

"Steve is looking for me," he warned once he'd blown his nose. "He's got a couple of his friends looking around and they've gotten closer than I wanted a few times." 

She did not revel in her victory because it was pyrrhic at best and a part of her was a bit disappointed to have won -- to have let Barnes take her to New York, to _Steve_ , and have other people sort out her mess while she was reunited with the man she had loved and lost... that would have been the easier course, the kinder one. And the sane one. She knew that choosing to join Barnes's quest was objectively a bad idea, but, like Barnes, she did not care. Right now, all she wanted was to stop hating herself just a little, enough to think clearly and try to process everything that had happened to her in the last day. 

"If they catch us, they catch us," she finally said, since she couldn't promise that she wouldn't slow him down. She would, even if she weren't helpless in this time. "If facing Steve is the worst outcome we face, then we'll be fine."

Barnes laughed bitterly. "It's not. HYDRA's not the only ones with guns still after me and whatever they wanted with you, they still might."

"They don't," she assured darkly. "They wanted Director Carter of SHIELD. Whatever they wanted her for, I haven't done it yet. They wanted a device I haven't even heard of, let alone hidden away." 

Barnes froze in his loop between window and bed. "Maybe not hidden away yet, but you might've seen it. The time-travel device isn't completely random; it requires a focal point so that you don't go back to when you were a baby or anything like that. If you ran into this thing, even if you didn't know what it was, maybe that's good enough?"

She shook her head. "I don't know what a maser is, so where I might have encountered it..."

"A _l_ aser?"

"No, a _m_ aser," she corrected. "I'm quite sure of that, they asked me about it enough times."

Barnes made a face. "We'll have to look it up." 

"In what?" she scoffed. "The encyclopedia? I'm aware that whatever was novel in 1949 may be commonplace now, but if this maser were common enough to be in an encyclopedia, they wouldn't have dragged me through time to get HYDRA's."

Which might or might not be true, but she suspected it was. Barnes didn't challenge her on it, though. Instead, he smiled. 

"Not the encyclopedia," he said and she would have sworn he looked almost delighted. "The _internet_."

Barnes wouldn't explain what the internet was, saying it defied any explanation and had to be seen to be appreciated. "It's magic," he said when she pressed, to which she gave him her most unimpressed look. The same look she'd given him when he used to present the terribly hung-over Commandos the morning after a night of liberty and pronounce them intact and innocent of all charges and she knew he recognized it. "Imagine the entire world is on a party line on the hallway phone. If you need something spelled for you, someone on the line somewhere else will get a dictionary for you. If you need the lyrics to a song, someone will sing them for you. If you want the filthiest pornography, someone'll have that, too, because this phone has pictures."

It was a useless explanation, as he knew it would be and he looked unrepentant when she told him so. 

"Where do we go from here?" she asked as she checked her drying clothes in the closet. "If we're not going to New York."

Barnes made a face and she thought he was about to challenge her on the not going to Steve bit, but he wasn't. "Back to Walmart to get you more stuff if you're going to be here a while," he finally answered. "And then to Ohio. There's a HYDRA research cell outside of Dayton and they might know where the other devices are -- or know who would. It would've been my next stop if you hadn't proven that Maryland was the right place."

They were underway within the hour, her twenty-first century life crammed into a couple of plastic bags. Barnes had given her a pencil and notepad to make a list of what she'd need, assuring her that whatever it was, it would be at the Walmart. He'd looked it over when she'd finished, adding things that sometimes made no sense (a tablet of what?) and sometimes were just modern versions of familiar items (naproxen was "aspirin, but better"), and sometimes were comments on what she'd listed (quantities or qualities of shirts and trousers). 

In the light of day, the future looked both much more strange and much less frightening. Many of the cars were candy-colored and looked more like tiny space-ships from the cartoons than actual vehicles, but there were an awful lot of silver ones like the one they were riding in and she didn't think that was any kind of accident. She peered unashamedly into every car they passed or waited at a light next to, seeing what people in the future looked like. They looked a lot like _people_ , albeit people with different hairstyles and peculiar dress, but not nearly as peculiar as she'd have imagined. America in 2015 wasn't that much more strange to her than America in 1942 had seemed when she'd first arrived.

The Walmart was the size of the hangars at Brize Norton, but instead of airplanes, it was everything under the sun. Maybe they did have an airplane or two in here; she wouldn't have been any more astonished. It took them almost three hours to complete their shopping, mostly because Peggy couldn't figure out how the modern woman dressed in any situation and she could hardly ask for assistance in provisioning for a series of raids on secret villainous lairs. But, with the help of both some gracious fellow customers as well as Barnes, she was finally accessorized and had learned about jeans and sports bras and synthetic fabrics. The prices were astronomical, but she'd seen the tags on what he'd bought this morning and had gawped then, so she simply took him at his word not to worry about how much anything cost because money was worth far less now.

"HYDRA's paying for it anyway," he'd said as they'd chosen a backpack for her in the camping department. "Most of the older cells had stashes of bearer bonds for ready, untraceable cash; I hit the ones I could get to first. It keeps them from using the money, but I figure there's no reason I have to keep living like the animal they kept caged and so they can provide the beds and nice meals as I run around destroying everything they built."

It was said without bitterness, with a touch of wry humor instead. It sounded like Sergeant Barnes and she didn't want to ruin anything by saying so. She thought he largely appreciated just how much of his old self was in the new man he'd become, but he was keeping his distance from Steve for a reason and she didn't want to give him the same reason. 

"You are ever pragmatic," she said instead, then held up another backpack option, this one without the fat padded wrapping around the mid-section. "This one is lighter, I think."

The other reason they spent so much time in Walmart was because Barnes gave her her first lesson on "the modern surveillance state." Motion picture cameras were everywhere, he explained, and could be as tiny as a shirt button because they didn't need film anymore. Barnes pointed out the tiny lenses tucked into corners of the ceiling and told her that they could record everything and play it back anywhere immediately over the internet. While the cameras were mostly to protect against theft and were watched, if at all, by the store's security staff, they could also be viewed by governments or police or anyone who could hack into the store's network, whatever that was. "You have to avoid the cameras without looking like you're avoiding the cameras," he warned. "Or else you might as well be trailing a big balloon that says 'guilty.'"

She was not unfamiliar with tradecraft in a civilian setting and told Barnes that, but teasingly because he hadn't been talking down to her. "I might not yet be Director Carter," she said after demonstrating a flawless evasion by tilting her head away from the camera slightly and covering the motion by pretending to look at her wristwatch. "But I am still Agent Carter and I have been doing this for long enough, even if it is still human eyes I'm used to ducking."

He smiled. "Fair enough," he agreed, tipping his Yankees cap slightly toward her in deference. "We'll focus on the technology instead. Let's go find you your tablet-of-what, yeah?"

Which was how Margaret Charlotte Agnes Carter met the internet. 

"It really is magic," she mused as she played with the tablet in the coffee shop near the Walmart. The tablet was so small and its images so bright and so crisp and so colorful and she had to use the stylus because she was still hesitant to poke it with her fingertips. The internet was indeed amazing and could be accessed almost anywhere (Barnes had tried to explain 'wifi' and 'cell phones' and that had led to satellites and rocket ships and she'd let him off the hook out of compassion) with the proper encoding, which her tablet did not have because acquiring it required more documentation than he could easily manufacture. Also, Barnes said, it made him -- and now them -- more vulnerable to being tracked remotely by anyone who wanted to look for them. She thought it was all a little paranoid -- justifiable, perhaps -- but he assured her it was not.

"Go to the map program on that thing," he told her, waiting for her to figure out how, which took a few moments and at least one errant tap of the stylus. "It knows where you are already without you telling it and it's fresh out of the box."

And so it did, right down to that it knew that they were in a shop called Starbucks in Edison, New Jersey. 

"For most everyone, it's not a problem to offer up your location in exchange for the convenience of being able to access the internet wherever," he said. "For a lot of people, the idea that they can be located in an emergency is a comfort. For me, it's a problem. The burner phones we got are harder to track because they're not on file anywhere, but if you called Steve with one, he'd know where you are until you got rid of the phone."

The public wifi network that she was using now was unsafe in many ways, Barnes explained, but most of those ways made it safer to hide from anyone who might be looking. It was still a bit of a risk, but one he deemed acceptable. The tablets were incredibly powerful tools despite their slight size and seeming fragility. "They can do what you used to need the entire SSR to do and I don't exactly have a lot of help these days."

Barnes had purchased his own -- a replacement for the one he'd intentionally destroyed before storming the base in Havre de Grace -- and used it with practiced ease.

"You need to be able to use smart technology if you're going to do anything now," he said, gesturing at her tablet. "There's very little with buttons and dials on it anymore. And it'll answer your questions about history better than I can."

With that mind, they'd bought a set of history books, the kind that went on display to make the owner seem more erudite. The four books spanned the twentieth century and beyond. ("There's stuff I don't know well enough to separate out what I was told from what really happened and then there's stuff I can't even begin to explain and I already got you the kiddie book about the aliens.")

They were on the road for most of the afternoon and into the evening, stopping for dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia at a restaurant that served very gussied-up diner food and justified it by calling it "New American," before pushing on to a motel outside of Columbus to rest and wait.

Peggy spent the trip fiddling with the tablet and looking out the window, mostly into other cars because the scenery outside of urban areas was occasionally lovely but mostly monotonous. She read bumper stickers and highway signs and even the 'baby on board' placards until she realized that they were all the same. Mostly, she people-watched; people-gawked, if she were honest. Many people were talking even if there was no one else in the vehicle with them and that had required an explanation of speakerphones and other hands-free technology. It wasn't a very complicated explanation, at least compared to some of the others she'd required, because while, yes, the idea that you could tell your car to call your mother and it would oblige was fantastical, it wasn't as if she hadn't ever used a radio to talk to someone sitting in a tent half a continent away.

"The future's like that," Barnes said at one point. "Full of things you'd never imagine and yet somehow disappointing all the same. The World of Tomorrow back at the Fair didn't look anything like this and sometimes it feels like a let-down."

There were games on her tablet and she played them -- with the volume turned off -- to increase her comfort with touching the screen but also because they were delightful and stupid and she was fascinated by the technology that allowed her to drag her finger across a surface and _do things_ beyond leave a smudge. There was music to listen to, movies to watch, it took pictures, it recorded notes, it allowed her to look on the map and see not only where they were, but how much traffic there was on the way. That was not half of what it could do, Barnes had assured her, but most of the rest was nothing they needed to do -- order dinner to be delivered, for instance, without picking up a phone. And electronic mail, which sounded like a dream had she had anyone she'd dared send a letter to.

Barnes had installed some reference material on her tablet while they'd been at the Starbucks and now there were encyclopedias to look at when it wasn't connected to the internet as well as Wikipedia when it was. She'd already looked at Steve's page on Wikipedia, which had been painful and ridiculous and oddly invasive. She was mentioned a few times, notably in the 'personal life' section where it documented that the two had been lovers, but she did not click on the link that would lead to her own page. She didn't want to know any more about her future than she already did, even if she was currently on a mission to change it entirely.

She waited until she was lying on her bed in the hotel room, Barnes doing the same on his own, before looking at his page. It still had his date of death being 9 October 1944 and seemed a very dry and overly reduced description of the man she'd known. The page spoke of his accomplishments as a soldier and the many posthumous awards and recognitions he'd received, but apart from a paragraph of biography detailing his childhood and his friendship with Steve, there was nothing about the man and that saddened her. Bucky Barnes, who was not the man on the next bed, had been clever and funny and good-hearted and kind and deserved more than to be immortalized as "well-liked."

The Winter Soldier had a page as well, which she did not look at until Barnes was in the shower. It was flagged as inadequately sourced and possibly biased, the former being obviously true and the latter rendered inconsequential because of it. The entire thing read like a potboiler novella or a comic book, full of escapades that made little sense inasmuch as what Barnes had told her his function had been as that 'asset.' According to the Wikipedia, the Winter Soldier was the creation of HYDRA -- or the Soviets, or maybe both -- and he had been around since the 1960s, but maybe earlier, although he had never been rumored to have participated in any of the major conflicts of the 1950s. He was blamed for the assassination of a president, various plane crashes, and so many murders that he would have hardly have had time to get chilly, let alone be frozen for years. It spoke more concretely of events in greater Washington DC in 2014, including the assassination of the then-current SHIELD director and a shootout on the highway and then in the city streets that culminated in the arrest and detention of Captain America during HYDRA's attempted coup. There were photographs, none that could be useful in identification beyond the arm and maybe the hair, and a section theorizing that there wasn't actually a single Winter Soldier, rather instead a sequence of them and that it was simply the male equivalent of the Red Room's Black Widow program.

"Did you get to the part where they think Russian guys volunteer to get their left arms lopped off for the glory of the Rodina?" Barnes asked, startling her. She hadn't heard the water turn off, let alone realize that enough time had passed for him to get dressed. She had the grace to look ashamed and clicked away from the page before putting the tablet down.

"I'm sorry," she said, meaning it.

He nodded, but then shrugged as he crossed the room to where his backpack sat. "It's not like I've never looked at it. And you should know who you've chosen to hitch your wagon to."

She snorted indelicately. "Whoever that man is, he's not the fiction depicted here. Unless you really did push a campaign bus over a cliff with your bare hands in Chile."

That got him to smile, as she'd hoped it would -- she'd picked one of the most outlandish and politically pointless of the supposed crimes attributed to the Winter Soldier.

"You'd be surprised how many people believe everything they hear about me," he said and she pretended that she hadn't heard him stumble over the last word as he'd started to say 'him.' "If I didn't have so much real blood on my hands, I'd better appreciate the advantages of being such a legend."

"You were a proper legend before you were the Winter Soldier," she told him, picking the tablet back up and returning to her browsing.

The next day was spent preparing to raid the HYDRA cell in Dayton, or, more precisely, Miamisburg. They arrived in Dayton in the morning, had lunch, then proceeded to drive by the building that presented itself as a commercial warehouse but was, according to Barnes, a lab and armory for HYDRA's midwestern operations.

"HYDRA couldn't deal with the mob or the corruption, so they had to spread out a little," Barnes answered when she suggested Chicago would have been a more pragmatic location.

They went past the site at a reduced speed justified by the poor state of the road, which seemed to have been patched a dozen times without ever being evened out, and Peggy used Barnes's tablet's camera to make a movie of the street as he drove. The purpose of the drive-by was to make sure that nothing important had changed since the Google Maps images had been generated the previous year and to see how many people were about on what was hopefully a typical day. (Instantaneous satellite and street-level surveillance of almost any location, they both agreed, fell into the 'wondrous' part of the future.)

The rest of the day was spent in a hotel room that charged by the hour and asked no questions, but instead of a frolic, the two of them plotted out a plan of attack. Well, Barnes did the planning, but he included her in every step of it and she couldn't help but feel a sense of deja vu. When the Howling Commandos had first been formed, Steve had been the commanding officer in rank only and Barnes had walked him through every mission assigned to them and then did most of the planning himself, showing Steve why he'd chosen one thing or another and expecting Steve to pick it up. Which he had, with a quickness that had astonished Peggy but not Barnes. She'd watched them a couple of times, usually when neither man had realized she was there, and she'd been touched and impressed by the way they'd worked together. 

Here and now, though, while two of them didn't have twenty years of finishing each other's sentences behind them, they did have some history and it made things... not easier, but less strange. Barnes didn't want her along as a comrade, instead he wanted her to hang back as the officer she'd once been and that was their first point of conflict. 

"I'm not saying you can't," he cut off her protest. "I'm saying that you don't have to. There is nothing on the breach I can't handle by myself and I don't want to have to worry about you tagging along without protection or some pistols that fit your grip better. I'm not going to keep you out of danger; I know better than that. But that doesn't mean I am going to put you in danger when there's no point to it. I'll breach and sweep and you'll come in to hold and we'll search."

It wasn't until well after that she considered that he might have not wanted her to see him as the Winter Soldier, at least not now that she knew who he was. At the time, however, it had felt like he was being overly protective of his best friend's girl, although she had not been spiteful enough to say so. 

Besides, just because she wasn't going to break down the door with Barnes didn't mean that she was going to be sitting in the car waiting for his signal. She was to be armed and waiting and watching should anyone get past Barnes and look like they were about to cause trouble. 

"Is this going to be a problem?" he asked and she wasn't quite sure what he was asking. Would she do as he'd asked and not follow him in straightaway? Would she mind that he was likely going to kill most of the people he did encounter? Would she hesitate at killing anyone who escaped from the warehouse and proved a threat? 

"After Steve's plane went down, I more or less led the Commandos," she told him instead of asking for clarification. "Dugan was my sergeant as he had become Steve's and, before the first mission that looked like it might get messy, he asked me the same question. And I will give you the same answer I gave him: I will do what I have to and I will sleep soundly after it is over."

The smile she got was genuine and, whatever he had been asking, she'd apparently answered correctly. 

The first step of the plan was to find transport, since Barnes did not want to use the car for both the operation and the travel to the next destination. So he searched the internet for used car dealerships and found one that he said looked a little shady -- she had no frame of reference, still not quite past being transfixed at websites. 

"Does this mean I get to drive?" she asked. She'd offered during their trip from New Jersey, but he'd demurred, saying that she should get a bit more used to her surroundings before she had to start focusing on the road. He knew she could drive; she'd driven him around plenty of times back during the war. 

"Might as well get some practice in," he agreed. 

The first practice she got, however, was in how to use the 'burner phones' he'd acquired. They were not very modern phones as far as 2015 went, but they were marvels compared to what she'd left behind for reasons far beyond their size and portability. There were not only buttons instead of the rotary dial, but there was also a screen to see whether you were calling the proper number instead of hoping for the best. Also a redial button, which was perhaps the feature she considered the greatest improvement even if buttons were easier on the fingers. Barnes programmed the numbers of each into the other, so all she had to do was press a button to call him, but he also made her memorize the number just in case the phone got destroyed and they got separated.

The emergency contact, should things fall apart completely, was planned out as well.

"If anything happens to me, you go to Steve," he told her firmly. "Promise me."

She nodded, meaning it. "And the same goes for you," she replied.

The look she got back was bleak. "If something happens to you, then I've got no choice. I can't leave him wondering where you are if you're never coming back."

Because of course Steve was among those searching for her, the 'old' her from this time. She felt her heart ache anew and shook her head to clear it. "Neither of us are going to need to make that visit," she told herself as much as Barnes. "So, what do we do next?"

What they did next was nap, a hedge against being up half the night -- or all of the night -- with the warehouse assault and then the drive out of town afterward. She didn't think she'd be able to sleep with the weight of their recent conversation still pressing on her, but she dropped right off. Years of catching sleep where and when she could would overcome anything, apparently.

When she woke up, it was dark outside the windows and Barnes was changed into the outfit she'd first met him in, with his arm exposed and the rest of him clad in black.

"The material gets in the way," he answered when she asked why he had cut the sleeve off of his working uniform when he wore regular clothing the rest of the time. "It constricts, it can get set on fire, it can get torn and gum up the plates... easier not to deal with it. Also, it makes people nervous if they're not sure how human I really am."

The last was said with a somewhat more sour tone, but she let it pass without comment. Instead, she got out of the bed and went into the bathroom, changing into the clothes they'd bought for the purpose: black trousers with plenty of pockets, the sports brassiere, a long-sleeved navy shirt of some sleek material and then a black long-sleeved cotton shirt. She pulled her hair back and fastened it with the stretchy hairbands so that it was in a tight mass at the back of her head.

The first stop was actually dinner, takeout Chinese that Barnes, in a coat that covered his arm and torso, went in to get. It didn't taste much like what she'd gotten in New York back in the Forties, but it was good and she was hungry and they ate in the car right out on the street.

Barnes then drove them to the auto dealer where he planned to steal the car, cruising past to make sure it was a place worth the effort, and then pulling over around the corner and getting out. "Your turn to drive," he told her and she thought about trying to hop over the gearbox to the driver's seat, but realized there was no way to do it gracefully and got out and walked around.

"Everything's a lot more sensitive than you're used to," Barnes warned from outside the car as she fastened the belt. "Gas, brakes, wheel, it's all a lot easier now, so be gentle."

He leaned inside to point out where the turn signals and lights were and how to adjust the mirrors and reminded her that it was an automatic transmission and she didn't need to change gears once it was in 'drive.' "Go down the next block and then go around the block once and then wait for me."

He closed the car door and patted it twice before disappearing. Peggy watched him disappear from her driver's mirror and then turned her attention to the car. Which had stopped looking like the inside of a fighter plane by the time they'd gotten to Ohio, but was still a lot more daunting than it had been from the passenger seat. She ran through the same litany she'd been taught when she'd first been taught to drive, some of which did not apply any longer, and turned over the motor.

"Here goes nothing," she announced to no one in particular. Or maybe the car, if it could understand her. Barnes had said that this one didn't speak, but that didn't mean it couldn't listen.

Barnes had warned her about the acceleration, but she'd still nearly shot out into the street with the force of a tiger's leap on the veldt, the power of it throwing her head back against the rest before she eased up on the gas and slowed to a gentle roll before accelerating more gently this time. The car was back to being a fighter plane, the slightest move of the controls resulting in great and terrifying changes, and she dared not go faster than ten miles per hour until after she'd made her first turn, which she'd nearly bollixed because it was now an easy fraction of a turn and not a two-handed solid wrench of the wheel. The second turn was less fraught, although she still braked -- lightly -- going into it. The third came with a stop sign and then, after the fourth, she slowed to look for a parking spot. This was a residential block, although at past-midnight there were very few lights on, and the houses had driveways, so street parking was not impossible. She pulled in, probably much too far from the curb as she'd been afraid of scraping the tire against it, and waited.

Less than ten minutes later, a car slowed down next to her and she could see Barnes at the wheel. She pulled out and followed him -- a direct tail, no need for obfuscation -- as he took them toward Miamisburg. It was on another residential street that he flashed his signal to pull over and this time, he parked. They left their belongings, such as they were, in the car Peggy had been driving, keeping only weapons and water and a first-aid kit for the ride to the warehouse in the new car, a boxy thing that looked blue in the street lights.

The warehouse, when they drove by it, looked deserted except for a light on in a second-story window. Barnes parked the car down the block and started to arm himself, handing her a compact machine gun to carry and a pistol with two extra clips to put into her tiny 'attack' pack, which otherwise contained only water, bandages, a knife, and a pad and pen. 

The initial breach was simple; Barnes had brought a pair of bolt-cutters and he got through the chained gate without incident. Her position was by a telephone pole that provided a good angle to see both the front and side entrances; the front had the loading bays with roll-up gates as well as a double door, but there was only a single-width door on the side closer to her. It had been hard to tell if there were other exits from either the Google Map images or the film she'd taken earlier today, but a quick peek now said that there was no door on the far side and the back was fenced in tightly and anyone escaping would need to scale barbed wire to do so and so she'd have to play the odds and stay where she was. 

There was no noise from the warehouse at first and she wondered if Barnes's intel had been wrong. She hadn't doubted it at any point earlier, although that was partially because she'd had to take everything he said about 2015 on faith. But this, tracking down HYDRA and looking for the time device that had brought her to the future, this had been his mission and it had brought him to her and that had only reinforced what a year at war had taught her in the first place: James Barnes was a very good soldier.

And then she heard gunshots.

"There we are," she announced to nobody in particular with a kind of mad, wry glee. The street was deserted and the report of the guns didn't travel well; if she didn't know what was going on, she might not have figured it out. As it was, though, she did know and she listened carefully as she kept vigilant for any kind of movement near the building. The gunfire was sporadic rather than sustained, the rat-tat-tat cut off abruptly sometimes, the last note of the three-burst trill echoing oddly as the weapon's bearer was dealt with.

She didn't worry about Barnes, not like she used to when Steve led the boys out and she prayed that they'd all return. They always had, save the once. Save the twice when it was Steve and, with that, her capacity for fear had been all but extinguished because the worst thing she could have imagined had come to pass and she'd somehow survived. And now here she was in the future with both of those tragedies undone, with Steve alive and Barnes's already remarkable skills burnished bright by cruel hands to a terrifying sheen. She did not fear his death; after all he'd already survived, she was not sure he would die even if shot. Her concerns for Barnes were entirely separate from anything to do with letting him storm a HYDRA base alone; she feared what HYDRA had done to his heart and soul in their quest to perfect his body as a weapon.

The gunfire stopped and the silence began. Nobody had come out the side door, which hadn't even opened, and nothing had shown from the front. Still, she waited because if she'd been a HYDRA agent inside that warehouse and somehow survived the initial assault, she would be playing dead until it was safe to run like hell.

But the first one through the door was Barnes, although she did hear one quick pair of pistol shots before he appeared. He waved and she approached, still watching the side until the angle was clear.

"Armory's been mostly cleaned out," he reported when she was close enough that he didn't have to raise his voice. He looked sweaty from exertion, but not exhausted or harmed. He switched his water bottle to his left hand so that he could use his right to wipe the hair off of his damp forehead. "But there's enough to resupply and the computers still work."

She nodded. "Did you leave anyone around to help us with that?"

She knew what a computer was, but entirely from pictures and explanations written for people who already had a gist. 

"Two," he replied, turning to lead her inside. "They're not exactly eager to assist. HYDRA today is much more fanatical; anyone who's still at it now that they're officially terrorists is doing it out of belief, not because they're following orders."

The entry was more or less a reception area, a wall with the company's name in large letters and a receptionist's desk and then a heavy door to the business behind, including the loading bays. The door was off its hinges and the smell of a firefight hit her as soon as she passed through the warped jamb. The main lights were off, but the secondary lights, perhaps emergency lamps or just night lights, were lit and cast a depressing and dim fluorescent glow over what had been the battlefield. The space was open, like the warehouse it was supposed to be, shelving in the front and, because the shelves were mostly empty, she could see banks of desks in the rear.

The banks of desks had computers on them, which looked neither like the historic photographs of computers she'd looked at nor the the tiny portable machines now reclassified as "laptops." These, while sleek and black like everything else in the future seemed to be, were still somewhat like what she'd imagined a typewriter might look like seventy years into the future. The lab was also a misnomer as far as she went because it had no chemicals or anything "science-y" (oh, how Howard hated that word) and looked more like a cross between an auto repair space and an operating table.

The two HYDRA agents were both women, both Indian-looking, and both bound to chairs at multiple points with tape over their mouths. As such, they were breathing loudly from their noses, which did not keep them from giving both her and Barnes venomous looks.

"Stan and Ollie here know how everything works," Barnes said as he gestured toward the women. "The problem is getting them to share it with us. Take off the tape and all you'll get is that if one of them gets cut down, two more will rise to take her place."

He cocked an eyebrow at Peggy, who interpreted that as a question whether she wanted to take a crack at them or not. She nodded and he stepped back to lean against the operating table.

She took a moment to decide on an angle of attack. The women were young, her age at best, and they had the look of true believers about them, as Barnes had warned. But that did not mean that they couldn't be broken, although it might mean that it would take more time than they had. But she'd done more with less.

She walked around the chairs so that the women didn't have to crane their necks to see her and stood in front of the one with just that little bit of moisture around her eyes. The other one was of sterner stuff, or at least fronted better, but what really sold Peggy was that she wasn't so much glaring at Peggy as glaring at the other woman.

"Sergeant, if you'd be so kind to take Stan somewhere else, please," she said, looking at Barnes but gesturing to the dry-eyed one. Barnes nodded without speaking and pulled Stan away by the back of her chair. Which had wheels and thus didn't make any noise as it rolled away. He didn't go that far, just into the shelving area, and she could see him still. He was undoubtedly keeping her in his line of sight and she did not mind the protection.

"Hello, darling," Peggy began conversationally as she returned her attention to Ollie. "My name is Peggy Carter. And I'm the ghost of Christmas Past, here to warn you that unless you mend your ways, all is lost. You do not die bravely in this scenario. You do no honor to your masters or your cause. And speaking as someone who actually had to deal with Johann Schmidt, I assure you this display would earn you no regard in his eyes. He'd have shot you both in the head already and forgotten you by the time he got to the door."

The woman Peggy had decided could be Ollie did not change expression, continuing to glare at Peggy as if daggers could come from her eyes.

"What I am offering you is not salvation, nor is it grace," Peggy continued. "You deserve neither, not when you cannot value human life enough to grant such blessings to those around you."

She reached out and held Ollie's nose between her index and middle fingers firmly, so that Ollie could neither breathe nor pull away.

"What I am offering you is a painless death," she said once Ollie stopped squirming and started paying attention. The window for this part was usually quite brief, between the struggling to break free and the struggle to stay conscious with no oxygen. "You think you'd be happy to die for your cause, but dying isn't easy and, unless it is done with great care, it is not quick. It is lonely, it is terrifying, and it hurts in ways you can only imagine because there is no hope of it ending. There will be no moment of relief, no break in the agony, no mercy. It's a terrible way to go, with nothing to focus on but your own pain and your own regrets and, with nobody to comfort you in your final moments, your own isolation."

Ollie's eyes were starting to water again, not from tears, but from not being able to breathe and so Peggy let go. Ollie pulled her head back as best she could and snorted loudly as she tried to get oxygen back into her system. Peggy had done drowning training with the SSR; she understood the sort of elemental fear that came with suffocation and how the body fought for its own survival and how that usually turned to panic.

She grabbed Ollie's nose again. "A gut wound is the most efficient way to draw it out," she said in a lecturing tone. "The pain is tremendous and, even if there was some way to get you to a hospital immediately, the damage would be too great. Nick an intestine and you've poisoned the entire body and they'll never stop the contamination in time. I saw it often enough during the war.

"But nobody will be coming for you here," she went on, smiling. "You'll bleed out, if you're lucky. If you're not, you'll lie there with the reek of your own guts filling your nostrils until the infection takes over and the fever kicks in and you'll die raving and in agony."

Peggy let go and stood back a step. "I can assure you that you won't be lucky," she said once Ollie had snorted her way back from hyperventilation. "Or I can make sure that you never feel a thing. It's your call."

She gave Ollie a moment, ostensibly to think but really so that she could gauge whether Ollie had softened up any. She thought it had worked a little; Ollie looked angry still, but more resentful than defiant. Which was halfway home. There was a difference between being willing to die for a cause and wanting to die.

She went into her little backpack and pulled out the combat knife, unsheathing it and holding it up for Ollie to see. "I am going to remove the tape across your mouth now," she told her. "And if the first words you speak are 'Hail HYDRA,' then this knife goes into your large intestine and you can die smelling your own shit while we work on your friend. Who I think will be much more helpful with you whimpering in agony on the floor next to her."

She ripped off the tape without gentleness and Ollie gasped lungfuls of air. Peggy waited with the knife in the proper position to strike, mostly for show, although she would if she had to. But Ollie didn't speak a word.

"Sergeant," she called over to Barnes. "We have a winner."


	3. Chapter 3

"Is this your idea of a joke, Sergeant?" Peggy asked as Barnes held up a pair of yellow paperbacks. They were in a bookstore on the outskirts of St. Louis, both to acquire actual books and to make use of the wifi in the attached coffee shop. But while Peggy had already chosen some more substantive history texts on HYDRA past and present than could be found on the internet, Barnes had apparently been off larking.

How else to explain the copies of _Windows 10 for Dummies_ and _Laptops for Seniors for Dummies_ offered up for her examination?

"If anything, I'm the senior citizen out of the two of us," Barnes pointed out with a frown, adding the two books to the pile cradled in the crook of her arm. "I asked the clerk for the best choice to help someone not familiar with computers get used to a new laptop and she handed me these."

Peggy gave him a look to make it clear she was not completely buying his story, but she shifted the pile in her arm to accommodate them. "It's probably for the best that she thought you were worrying about your doddering grandmother rather than explaining the truth."

They had acquired the laptops after raiding a HYDRA cell in Springfield, Illinois, an assault that had gone much like the one in Dayton up until the point where it hadn't. The Springfield cell had been in an office park, a short, gleaming structure surrounded by neatly manicured lawns and had required her playing dress-up to case the joint during business hours. (A wig and glasses and then clothes that the saleslady at Ann Taylor had called "business casual" without even blinking at the oxymoron, all to be late for an appointment with the accountant on the second floor who wasn't in that day.) HYDRA had taken the third floor in its entirety and Peggy had expected to encounter something else entirely when she'd "accidentally" wound up there, pleading British ignorance of the American habit of calling the ground floor a first floor. But what she'd seen had been _an office_ , partitioned and carpeted and with ringing phones and looking very much like actual work was done there and not armed warriors playing pretend. She'd come out wondering if Ollie had lied to them after all.

Her return that night with Bucky had proven Ollie's value as a source, however. It had also required Peggy to use the pistols Barnes had selected for her before he'd blown up the warehouse in Dayton. She hadn't hesitated, but she hadn't been as blasé about it as she'd promised Barnes she'd be. HYDRA now was not cold-eyed Aryans in death's head uniforms; it was young men and women, frequently not white, and they had sought out HYDRA as a choice, as the best opportunity they saw for a better, more equitable world. They were young _fools_ , idealistic fools, desperate for order in a world that had none. Barnes hadn't been exaggerating when he'd said that anything went in the future and, for many, with those freedoms had come the sense of being unmoored. HYDRA made sense of the chaos in their lives, sense that seventy years of wars and cultural changes and subversion of tradition had bled out of the world. And HYDRA had filled that void, with terrible results. She could raise a weapon against anyone who threatened to hurt her, but it was hard to muster satisfaction in killing what sometimes amounted to confused children.

But if the alternative was to let the world burn in HYDRA's name, then so be it. She had chosen her path long before she'd come into the future. Which still held much mystery.

"Will one of those explain the difference between a CD and a DVD?" she asked as she added the book she'd been perusing to the top of the stack and then handing the entire pile over to Barnes to carry. He accepted them easily, making a face at the newest addition -- a picture book of contemporary fashion.

She'd stumped him earlier with the question; they had picked up both in Springfield, but he didn't know what either stood for or what the distinction was, just that both looked like tiny, metallic records and were used for portable data storage of a more permanent nature than the flash drives they'd gotten from Dayton. The laptops were equipped to play them both, he thought, although they hadn't yet tried. Their priority had been putting distance between them and Springfield, not examining their ill-gotten booty.

"I don't see why you think it's important," he said sourly. "If it's got a little record icon, it means you can grab it and go."

"There's more to life than simple pragmatism, Sergeant." She smiled at him and led him toward the cashier.

The laptops, along with the rest of their haul and all of their worldly possessions, were in the car trunk; Barnes worried that the laptops were booby-trapped in some fashion and letting them connect to the internet without checking them first could draw unwanted attention. Instead, they used their coffee shop time to work their way through coffee and ridiculously-sized scones and use their tablets. Peggy had started a notebook of things to look up during their internet sessions, everything from "quinoa" to "Bangladesh," which she pulled out and began researching while Barnes plotted out how to get to their next destination and what to do once there.

Ollie had given them Springfield as a place some of the HYDRA personnel had been transferred to after the liquidation of the materiel stockpiles in Dayton. She thought the weapons had gone there as well, but after having been to the location, they dismissed that out of hand and nothing they'd found in the building had indicated that the trucks full of guns and bombs had been anywhere near the place. Springfield had been an information clearinghouse, a place that coordinated the work of others and not one that got its hands dirty itself. It handled contacts with HYDRA-affiliated groups in the region, all with benign fronts such as charities or small businesses, and gave them their marching orders and the tools with which to carry out those orders. Springfield had probably ordered the weapons to be taken from Dayton, but they had never intended on being the recipients.

But while the weapons were still in the wind -- a dangerous gale, no doubt -- they had still come away with the next link on the chain that would hopefully bring them back to the Forties. Nobody in Springfield -- and they had had more than just two opportunities to try for information out of the representative body -- had heard of a time-travel device, let alone ordered it shipped from one cell to another. But one helpful soul did know where the people who did might be found: Searcy, Arkansas.

If Springfield was the communications and supply hub for the little fish, Searcy was the deluxe model for the bigger ones. A concierge for high-rent evil, more or less. They were the ones who orchestrated the actions of politicians and magnates, at least in this part of the country, and they were the ones who took care of special projects for HYDRA's higher echelon. They weren't the only such providers of these services, but Peggy agreed with her unfortunate interviewees that if the operators in Searcy didn't have the answers, then they would know who did.

"If it's so easy to find these places, why hasn't anyone shut them down?" Peggy asked as they sat in a relatively quiet corner of a busy Lion's Choice with their sandwiches. They intentionally chose chain restaurants at peak hours when they could; the high customer turnover and minimal staff attention meant that they would stick in fewer memories. (She'd taken to affecting an American accent after the first time someone asked where she was from and what she was doing there.) It meant a lot of mediocre food, but it was hard to enjoy anything nicer when a more unique menu required much higher vigilance. Especially traveling with Barnes, who was not very comfortable around people. He could move through a crowded Walmart like a shark through water, but she could see the struggle in his eyes to sit through a meal in a restaurant. How much he was forcing himself to endure on her behalf, she couldn't ask him, but she would make the occasional suggestion that they take food out instead of sitting and eating there and pretend it was for her comfort and not his.

"It's not that easy for everyone else," Barnes replied once he'd swallowed his bite of roast beef. "They're bound by more rules than we are and there's probably still enough HYDRA in the hierarchy to keep the good guys chasing low-hanging fruit. They sacrifice the odd prize to make it look like things are getting better, but they're just re-shuffling what they always had."

Which was an answer that both made sense and upset her digestion a little because she -- the future she, at least -- was responsible for HYDRA's ability to move freely at the upper levels of government. She sipped at her drink, or at least tried to -- a chocolate-chip "concrete" that really did live up to its namesake and would have benefited from a spoon instead of a straw.

"I suppose we're also working with a little extra inside information," she said, rather than comment on the rules they were not following. Barnes had previously explained that law enforcement in this day and age was no longer the pragmatic machine she'd known where anything went so long as it got results. But while she could applaud the retirement of the rubber hoses and other tools that someone like Jack Thompson seemingly couldn't work without, she wasn't sure how much value was in prioritizing the appearance of sanctity over fighting the best war they could. And the war against HYDRA was just that, with spies and double-agents and soldiers willing to kill and die for their cause.

They spent the night in St. Louis, at another hotel that was better than a hot-sheet hideaway if not quite the sort with mints on the pillows (and requests for photo ID at check-in). There was no wifi, but Barnes flipped some switch on the laptops to make sure that they couldn't have connected if there had been -- apparently people could bring wifi with them with the proper tools, which just went to show Peggy how little she understood about how the internet worked. 

The road to Searcy was straightforward; the mapping program offered several options, but the shortest route was the fastest and had no tolls, which Barnes wanted to avoid as a rule because it meant cameras and the increased likelihood of having to ditch and replace the car that much sooner. What they would do once there, that was less clear. The address in Searcy was in a part of town classified as "mixed use, commercial and industrial" by the town's own survey maps, posted online, but the building itself looked solidly commercial on Google's street view, a glass-fronted accountancy firm on the ground floor and an import/export firm advertising in the second story windows. She doubted "import/export" was any less shady an enterprise in the future as it had been in her time, but it justified the proximity to the railroad tracks and the moving of goods in bulk. There might in fact be someone on the first level who could offer the promised tax advice, but she presumed that the firm's bankruptcy expertise was more moral than financial. 

"There's a garage across the street that'll probably be closed at night," Barnes said as he sketched out the street on a piece of drawing paper, tapping a spot on the pad. He wasn't the artist Steve had been -- was, she supposed -- but he had apprenticed as a draftsman before the war and had always had a fine hand for maps and technical drawings. Howard had told him more than once that he could easily find a job in industry after the war -- he'd offered Barnes a job once or twice himself -- but it had become a moot point then. And now, for entirely different reasons. "If it's still there, we might be able to use it for recon."

The laptop, when she opened it up, looked a fair bit more intimidating than it had in Springfield, when it had just been something else strange to pack up at Barnes's command. The keyboard was both familiar and foreign, the letters in their proper places but all of the additional buttons giving her pause. 

"All right," she sighed to herself, reaching for the _Laptops for Seniors for Dummies_ book. "Time to be a dummy." 

She got through the first three chapters before she was too tired to make any sense of the text. Which was written for people who had been in diapers in the time she'd left, but those people hadn't been yanked through time and had had decades to get used to electric typewriters, word processors, and desktop computers, all of which were referred to here. 

On the other bed Barnes had finished his rendering of the map of HYDRA's home in Searcy and was now examining another of the laptops, which he handled with ease. From the bits and pieces that he occasionally offered up, she knew that he'd been in the freezing tube -- the cryo tank -- for longer than he'd been out of it, that he'd missed years at a time, decades almost, and had spent very little time 'in the world' even when he'd been active. And yet he showed complete mastery, if not necessarily comfort, moving through the world now. It wasn't just that he knew more than she did of how to act in 2015, it was that nobody else seemed to think he acted oddly. He had been on his own for a year, he'd told her, and that wasn't enough time to pass as native to this time -- she knew this with absolute certainty. She'd improved in leaps and bounds in her few weeks in the future, but her movements had been carefully guided and her exposure to risk minimized where it could not be eliminated; Barnes had had nobody to chaperon him in this time and she knew that his training would have taught him to separate himself from civilian society, not hide himself among it. But he hadn't; instead, he maneuvered himself -- and now her -- in what was close to plain sight and without drawing any attention. He could use technology as if he'd been born with it, could dress himself -- and her -- in appropriate clothes, and dealt with store clerks and waiters as if he were a visitor from out of town and not a stranger in a strange land. 

"How do you know how to live in this time?" she asked before she thought better of it. Barnes rarely offered up details about his life as the Winter Soldier unless they were relevant to whatever they were doing, but he didn't withhold answers if she asked. She didn't ask often -- it was a painful subject for them both for different reasons -- but curiosity got the better of her decorum tonight. She could blame tiredness and laptop confusion if she wanted to, but it had been something she'd been wondering about for a while as she struggled to adapt. 

"HYDRA had to catch me up every time they defrosted me," he said without looking up from what he was doing, which was poking at keys on the laptop, to some effect if the changing colors on the screen indicated anything. "Tech, languages, geography, fashion, even food sometimes if it was mission-critical. I had to be able to identify makes and models of cars. I had to know how to ride the subway in every city I had to work in, how to tell Soviet Bloc clothes from Western ones, how pagers and Polaroids worked. All of it. I process information faster than normal people can -- like Steve can -- and HYDRA used that to... force-feed me data, more or less. I didn't get to experience any of it, but I learned it all."

It was, she understood, typical of the answers he'd given her to her most brash questions about his past: complete in technical detail, but skipping over all of the personal trauma he'd endured as if it weren't germane. She never called him on it, choosing to believe that he didn't want the attention paid to his pain rather than that he might think that she didn't care. She knew he didn't think that -- well, she mostly knew. Barnes now was both far more enigmatic than he'd once been while also managing to be so shockingly open it sometimes felt like a vivisection. He was still re-learning how to interact with someone significant; she wasn't a cashier or a HYDRA agent, someone who ceased to matter once the transaction was complete. 

"You may have need to impart some of it to me, I fear," she said, closing the book. "I am either too dumb or too senior for their target demographic."

What she was to him besides 'not temporary' was evolving, she knew. She'd never been just his best friend's sweetheart, not then and not now. During the war, he'd treated her as capable of anything -- sometimes far more than she actually was able to do. Now, he had to take the lead in most situations by dint of his greater knowledge and capacity, but he did so in a fashion that was... not deferential, but respectful at least. He phrased what he thought they should do as a suggestion instead of an order, the way he had with Steve back when Captain America had been a greenhorn commander and Sergeant Barnes the experienced NCO. He didn't seek her permission, but he would wait for something like agreement from her, giving her at least a nominal ownership stake in the decisions, the way he had with Steve because Captain Rogers had to be the one issuing the commands even if he hadn't thought them up. And he let her make what decisions she could, not just for herself, but for them both: not only when they would travel or where they would stop, but also in the mission planning and execution. He'd put his foot down if he felt very strongly one way or another, but she could expect a reason. In return, she tried to reward his trust by using her authority to protect him where she could, both in their quest (where he was far too reckless with his own safety) and in his quiet struggle to regain his humanity.

She hoped he recognized all of it, that his facility with reading environments extended to the little bubble in which they currently lived. She knew he wasn't oblivious, that their continued use of old titles was no accident. But there were still parts of their dynamic that were murky with the fog of the unknown. Sergeant Barnes and Agent Carter in 2015 were still strangers in many ways and missing the element that had bound them so tightly back in 1944. Or, to be truthful, running from that element, which was its own kind of bond, but not a comfortable one to rely on.

Even when it had just been the two of them working to solve a problem for the Commandos or the SSR, Steve had been a presence even if he'd actually been an absence or an obstacle they were working around without his knowledge. Here and now, though, Steve was not a factor even as he was ultimately the raison d'etre for everything they were doing. He couldn't be spoken to in a quiet moment to make sure all was well or to ask for clarification. But, in Peggy's estimation, it was turning out mostly all right. Steve had been -- was -- an excellent judge of character and he'd chosen the both of them. They had that to fall back on when they were otherwise frustrated with each other, which certainly happened, if not regularly.

Now was not one of those times as he looked over at her laptop, with its "start menu" blinking kaleidoscopically at her with its offerings both vague and nonsensical.

"If it makes you feel better," he offered with a cheeky grin, "I'm pretty sure nobody born in this era understands Windows very well, either."

She turned to him with a frown. "It does not, Sergeant. It does not."

* * *

"I'm fine."

Peggy rolled her eyes, but did not take them off of the road. She was more comfortable driving now, but that didn't mean she was actually comfortable or that she knew where she was going well enough to look over at Barnes. Who was holding his arm tightly across his belly and bleeding all over the car's interior, which was how she'd left him when she'd stuffed him into the passenger seat.

"You are not fine in the slightest, Sergeant," she snapped, letting her anxiety and adrenaline burn off as anger. "You can probably convince me that you will be fine at some future point, but you are not right now."

Searcy retreated in the rearview mirror as she drove south, disappearing into tree-lined nothingness within moments. She had memorized the possible routes before they'd arrived, both the one that would take them to the nearest 'safe' resting point and the one that would take her east, toward Steve, should the worst come to pass. The worst hadn't come to pass, despite the mess Barnes was making to her right, and so when she saw the sign for Route 64, she took the turn.

Their raid on the HYDRA cell in Searcy had been carefully planned considering their limited resources and compressed time frame and, when they reviewed their actions to avoid repeating mistakes, Peggy did not think that there would be many on the tactical front. They had followed the directives they'd set for themselves, they'd done nothing to endanger the other, and they had more or less gotten what they'd come for. Which remained impressive considering that they had gone in not knowing what that was.

The problem -- and the reason Barnes was hissing in pain with every bump -- was strategic. They were going after increasingly bigger fish, which Barnes had dismissed as a factor but Peggy knew better. He had gone after bigger fish before and come away every time and he was not wrong to have faith in his own capacity to do so in the future. But, to drag the metaphor past where it should go, he had done so with a different fishing pole. In the past, he'd been an assassin, although he'd certainly done his share of intelligence work, and destruction, however elegant, had been the goal. In the present, he'd been able to continue on as he'd been without HYDRA's support system because of his skills and his knowledge and his utter indifference to his own survival. He hadn't been reckless, which was a distinction she'd failed to distinguish for him when they'd argued about it the other day. He had simply treated everything he'd done, every base he'd raided, every move he'd made to find the original time device and, through that, find _her_ , as if his only options had been to succeed or die trying.

Now, of course, things were more complicated and she didn't feel guilty in the slightest for being the main reason why. But those complications, including the mandate to live, were _complicated_ and they were still adjusting.

"Slow down."

"Do you need me to pull over?" she asked, checking the mirrors to see if she could do so if necessary. She didn't know how exactly how badly he was injured, just that he'd said that it would keep until they were clear. She'd had to trust him that he hadn't been lying, but he still looked more annoyed than near death, so there was that.

"No," Barnes answered with more wryness than discomfort. "But you're over the speed limit."

"I thought getting away from the bad men with lots of guns was more important than risking a ticket," she said sourly, but complied. "I would think half of the police in the county are headed toward Searcy now."

They'd had to discharge their weapons early and often, but the big gunfight hadn't happened until the egress -- had caused the egress in the first place because that had been the tipping point between 'getting what they could' and 'getting out alive.' Which they had, but not unscathed. The Searcy office had had some kind of panic button or silent alarm to summon help and what had been a barely-managed situation with just the two of them against a dozen had grown quickly into a barely-escapable one once the HYDRA cavalry had arrived. The rate of gunfire had been astonishing -- automatic weapons in this time were smaller and lighter and fired much more quickly -- and while it hadn't felt anything like the war, it had certainly reminded her of it. 

"They'll still wonder about a car burning rubber the other way," Barnes pointed out. "Besides, places like these make book on speeding tickets." 

She dropped another five miles per hour off of the speedometer because neither of them had so much as a fake identification on them and none of the alternatives for what to do with such an encounter with law enforcement had a good ending. Certainly not with Barnes wounded as he was. 

They drove in a comfortable silence for a while before Barnes, determined to not let what Peggy suspected were broken ribs hinder his actions, first reached into the backseat for water for them both and then started fiddling with the radio. She barked at him to sit still. 

"Just trying to find the news," he retorted sulkily, but he did lean back in the seat in evident discomfort, which served him right and she told him so.

"You know as well as I do that there won't be anything yet," she pointed out, softening her tone. She knew he knew that and that his restlessness had nothing to do with his concern about discovery. "What do you think will be on those laptops?" 

They had come away from the cell in Searcy with a couple of knapsacks full of laptops and data storage devices. She'd read enough of her _Dummies_ books to know that the laptops shouldn't have been necessary to read the data storage devices -- the ones they'd taken from Springfield would serve the purpose -- and indeed they had ignored most of the laptops in the offices. But there had been one room clearly marked as a "wifi dead zone" and had urgent warnings about not bringing cell phones or other recording devices inside. The laptops in that room had been plastered with stickers warning that they should not be connected to the internet and that, Barnes assured her, was special. The only way to keep things truly secret in this time, he'd explained, was to keep them away from the internet and away from anything that could connect to the internet. Which didn't explain, in Peggy's mind, why they would use laptops in the first place when anyone could walk away with them and do with them what they would. As she and Barnes had and hoped to do.

"If we're lucky, it'll be the good stuff," Barnes said after a moment. "The best internet security is to not have anything on a computer in the first place, but HYDRA these days needs to be portable. They've got a lot of people chasing them and they had to sacrifice some security for mobility. They still do the really important stuff the right way -- whoever's doing my job is getting verbal orders like I did -- but the rest they had to make vulnerable. It's still a pretty good setup; it took some effort to find them and their security would have been sufficient for the average burglar or SWAT team. And they'll still be cleared out by morning."

The security would have been sufficient for almost anyone except the Winter Soldier, she translated. Tonight had been the first time she'd seen that incarnation of Barnes in action. In Dayton, he'd done his work out of her sight, in Springfield, she hadn't seen anything that couldn't have been Sergeant Barnes if that man had been armed with twenty-first century weapons. But tonight, tonight she'd seen what HYDRA had turned Sergeant Barnes into and while it hadn't scared her, it had shocked her a little and she knew he'd seen that shock. She wanted to tell him that she'd gotten over it, that she was not any more afraid of him now than she'd been the night he'd found her -- far less, actually -- and that he'd done nothing shameful. But he was not ready to hear it and, she suspected, she was not ready to speak the words so that he could believe them. She knew with her whole heart that she was not scared of him -- she'd have been a right fool getting into a car with him, let alone badgering him about his injuries if she were -- but she didn't know how to tell him that seeing him move with such lethal efficiency had been a sharp reminder of what her future self had unknowingly abetted. She'd been horrified at _herself_ , not by anything he'd done.

"Hopefully we'll be able to follow them with what we've taken," she said as she followed the turn in the road west. From looking at the maps, she'd expected the route number changes to be more dramatic, she'd expected the routes themselves to be more dramatic -- highways, not rural roads -- but maybe this was just how America organized itself nowadays. She'd admittedly seen very little of it in her own time and seventy years of expansion had rendered that knowledge moot. "Even more hopefully, we won't have to follow them at all, we'll be able to jump ahead a step or two."

She saw the police lights before Barnes warned her, a cruiser on the shoulder with the deputy already writing out a ticket for a red car, not so much slowing down as taking her foot off the gas. She kept to the lower speed even after they were clear, which was just as well because there was a second police car, this one still trawling for victims, a few moments later. The town of Vilonia must have been hard-up indeed if they were dedicating so many resources to middle-of-the-night speed traps. Although it was perhaps not unreasonable; the urge to get through the nothingness and on to one's destination was great and there were almost no other cars on the road.

Conway, their destination, appeared out of the gloom less as a beacon than as a moderate change in the size of the shadows in the darkness. Soon enough, they reached what passed as the downtown and there were half a dozen hotels to choose from. Without asking Barnes, she pulled into the parking lot of the shabbiest-looking one, which was the only one not bearing some hotel chain's insignia. It didn't look very run down, however, at least not in the dark, and it was only for the night.

"Oh, absolutely not," Peggy warned Barnes as he looked to get out of the car. "If someone is going to have to sweet-talk the clerk into giving us a room without proper credentials, it's not going to be the fellow grimacing in agony and trying not to get bloody handprints on the reception desk. Nor will it be the lady accompanied by such a fellow."

It was better than saying that Barnes looked either like a serial killer or a murder victim. In the dim light of the motel parking lot, he looked dreadful, bloodied and dirtied and exhausted -- and still ready for a fight. They'd be more likely to get a visit from the police than a room were he to be seen. Besides, she'd watched what he'd done at previous stops and it wasn't as if she'd never had to charm a hotel clerk before, for both personal and professional reasons.

This clerk, who looked all of seventeen, seemed more put out about her saying that the room would be double occupancy because her boyfriend was getting their things than that she'd left her purse in the car and only had cash to pay up front with and a license plate number to rattle off. But not put out enough to not tell her that while they had no free wifi, the Days Inn next door did and then to provide the password. And also to mention that the neighboring hotel wasn't too careful about who they let in for the free continental breakfast, especially if folks were from out of town and not easily recognized. 

She scouted out the route from the car to the room before signaling that it was okay for Barnes to follow. He carried all of their gear, entirely to spite her, and she retaliated by turning on all of the lights before he'd have had time to adjust to the brightness.

"Strip to the waist," she told him as he was still blinking away the tears. She dug through her knapsack for the first aid supplies. "I want to see how bad it is."

She hadn't heard any rasping or labored breathing in the car, so she could hope that he hadn't had any ribs stove in enough to puncture a lung, but he was a bloody mess -- very literally -- and she wanted to see how badly he'd been hurt. Or if there was more than one wound, which he'd been very coy about revealing earlier, either because he didn't know or because he knew and was worried how she'd react. Both were equal possibilities.

Barnes tilted his head and cocked his eyebrow, a question and a response and a deflection all rolled up into one neat gesture.

"You have nothing to be shy about," she told him when he didn't budge. "You will not be the first super-soldier I've seen without his shirt on. And after Steve, I can guarantee you'll be a disappointment."

That got Barnes to move, at least by coughing out astonished laughter, which hurt his ribs, which made him hiss in pain.

"I can take care of it," he assured her once he'd regained his equilibrium. "Bathroom's got a mirror."

She was about to make a smart comment about how she had seen him without a shirt before many a time during the war and so she had a good idea for what she was in for when she realized that she was, in fact, not in possession of any such idea, good or bad. She'd never seen him without his shirt on in the present. They both changed in bathrooms and, like a light going off, she realized at this moment that it hadn't purely been out of consideration for her 1940s decorum or her status as his best friend's girl.

_She'd never seen the arm._

She'd seen it in part, of course. His battle costume exposed it from shoulder to fingertips, but where it met his flesh...

"As glorious as I imagine the gymnastics might be for you to stitch up your own chest whilst looking in a mirror," she told him, holding up the first-aid bag. "I believe I would be a more efficient provider of care. If Dum Dum Dugan was willing to let me stitch up his thigh, I think you can trust me with this."

"It's not that I don't trust your sutures," he began, then trailed off to a frown. He looked almost distraught, like a wounded animal realizing that it was cornered. But she knew he didn't want to fight his way free of her, at least not in any way that would cause a rupture between them. It would be easy -- would be merciful -- to let him off of the hook at this moment, but it would not be best for either of them. 

"I wasn't talking about the sutures," she replied levelly. And she let him see in her face that she _understood_ and didn't want to make this any worse than it had to be. 

It broke her heart to see him struggle with the realization, to recognize a promise of compassion and kindness and not be prepared to receive it because it was so unfamiliar. She'd had plenty of cause and chance to see how HYDRA had broken him a thousand different ways, but it never stopped hurting. No human deserved what HYDRA had done to him -- either time -- but James Barnes, above so many others, had deserved better and received only the worst. 

This time, she _was_ merciful -- by tucking away her sympathy behind brisk efficiency and letting him handle his emotions on his own, in private. "So. Sergeant. Do you strip or do I get the scissors?" 

In the end, she helped him, sans scissors. He could undo the buckles just fine, but getting his arms out of the sleeves with broken ribs was excruciating and she did what she could to minimize the torque on his torso. She left him to remove his undershirt himself because it was easier than fighting with him about it and retrieved the first-aid kit.

When she turned back, she saw what he'd been so careful to hide and understood why. But also thought it was unnecessary, especially in light of their past history. She'd seen him after Steve had brought him back from the HYDRA work camp; she had never mentioned it unless it had been truly necessary (and then out of earshot of all others, including Steve), but she'd never pretended it hadn't happened. HYDRA had been -- was -- a posse of depraved monsters and while seeing the scarification around his shoulder was breathtakingly appalling, it neither frightened her nor disgusted her. It made her furious, but she kept that to herself; he didn't need to deal with that, too, at this delicate moment.

She'd felt the weight of Barnes's gaze as she'd looked and now raised her own to meet his. He gave her a quick nod and she approached with the kit. 

The damage was both worse and much better than she'd thought; the bruising and soreness made it impossible to tell how many ribs were damaged, but at least three and there were two bullet wounds, one a graze alongside his ribs on his left side, one leaving a deeper gouge closer to the hip on the same side that was still oozing blood. She gave him temporary bandages that would protect the wounds from direct spray while he cleaned himself up in the shower. Barnes was trying to hold still, but she could feel him almost shaking with tension as she worked and hoped he'd be more relaxed when it came to the actual surgery. 

"I won't ask you to drop trou," she told him as she finished up and stepped back. "You'll let me know if there's anything else." 

Barnes nodded and went over to his pack to retrieve his toiletries kit, but then paused. "How did you get Dugan to let you sew him up? Where was Monty?" 

Monty had been the Commandos' team medic. But Dugan was -- had been, God, he was _dead_ now -- incredibly resistant to anyone nursing him. He'd possibly been worse than Steve with the pretense of invulnerability. 

"Monty was singing the Eton Boating Song wildly out of tune as he had quite the head wound," Peggy answered with a smile. It had been a ridiculous mission that they'd survived by miracle and wonder. "Jones was sitting in his lap to keep him from rowing along to the words and either losing the bandage or attracting the Germans. Morita was patching up Dernier and that left Dugan to me and I pulled rank."

Barnes returned her smile, lopsided and weak, but _real_. They had seemingly had a tacit mutual agreement not to speak of either Steve or the boys or, really, anything from Before. She chose to take it as a positive that he asked now, as a further offering of the olive branch of trust. 

While Barnes showered, Peggy went back to the car to get the electric kettle out of the trunk. It was a ridiculous item, something Barnes had picked up in the Wal-Mart in New Jersey and when she'd seen it, she'd asked him if he planned to make tea on the road and he'd said that he'd thought she might like that, but that it also had a more pragmatic purpose. She knew as well as he did that boiling water was for more than tea: wound care, food preparation, equipment maintenance, and the odd time when the water just didn't smell right. During the war, she'd boiled water in tin coffee pots and battered Belgian fry pans in the field and the sturdy kettles at the SSR, but _plugging it in_ just seemed so strange. But it had turned out to be practical and comforting, even if, up until now, they'd pretty much only used it for tea and instant noodles.

(She might or might not have made a habit of picking out the most exotic box of teabags whenever they were in a pharmacy or market for supplies. Acai was among the current selections on offer.) 

Tonight, however, she put the kettle alongside the suturing kit and gauze and tape and the other tools she'd need. She'd taken a nursing course when she'd joined the SSR -- she'd pretended to be like all of the other girls, but she'd gone in knowing that her charges were likely to be far from friendly lines, let alone a friendly hospital. She'd known what to do back then, but not what anyone did here and now beyond what Barnes had shown her before they'd attacked the cell in Dayton. So now there was antibacterial ointment and betadine along with fancier versions of what she'd learned how to use in 1940. 

Barnes emerged from the bathroom in a pair of sweatpants and no shirt, but he held his towel in such a fashion that made him look shy and she fought back a smile as she went into the still-steamy room to fill up the kettle and wash her hands. The arm, the shock of it gone, was not quite ignorable, but it wasn't necessarily the first view to draw the eye. Barnes was not Steve, but he was still a fine specimen and always had been and it hadn't just been his charm and his position of responsibility that had made him so popular among the ladies of London. 

She parked herself on the room's sole chair, next to where she'd spread out her supplies on the small table (and folded a napkin under the short leg to keep it from wobbling) and beckoned for him to approach. They didn't speak beyond the necessary as she worked; she considered apologizing for causing him pain necessary, although he didn't and seemed surprised by the sentiments. Not for the first time, she wished they had the time device right then and there so she could go back in time and punch everyone who'd ever treated him like a tool and not a man and desensitized him to the point where he spoke of medical care as 'maintenance' and held perfectly still despite his obvious discomfort because he'd been punished too many times for disobedience. 

"I'm rather impressed with myself," she said as she finished the last layer of stitches on the gouge, swabbing the site clean before applying gauze and getting him to hold it in place while she reached for the strips of tape. "If you're anything like Steve, it should heal with almost no scarring. Give it some time and nobody will ever know."

If he were anything like Steve, she realized belatedly, his shoulder wouldn't be the mess of scars that it was. Except that he had no other scars, so either he'd been remarkably fortunate in his career as a HYDRA assassin or the wretchedness of the attachment surgery had been so great as to overwhelm the serum's accelerated healing. She prayed that he'd been unconscious for it; from what little she'd been told and what she'd observed, that was no guarantee. 

She shook her head to clear her thoughts and reached for the length of bandaging. "Arms up, let's wrap your ribs."

Once Barnes was mummified, she refilled the kettle and put out their insulated metal lidded mugs and put a teabag of Sleepytime in his without consulting him. He professed indifference whenever she asked, a bad habit of his that extended to meal choices so that she could choose what she liked, but she knew what he picked for himself when he was the one with the kettle. 

But tonight the kettle was hers and he was digging out one of the laptops from Searcy when the water boiled. She poured his cup and hers, covering both, and went over to the beds, starting to build a mountain of pillows on his bed, taking one from her own bed to heighten the pile. "Take your toy and come to bed," she told him in her most matronly voice, arching an eyebrow when he gave her a look. "I'll not have you undoing my handiwork by slouching over there."

Getting him settled so that he wasn't in obvious pain took some work and then rolling up his coat underneath the pillow pile to make it high enough. Once he was, however, she brought him his tea and five of the naproxen tablets; giving him the bottle made it impossible to tell if he'd taken them or simply said he had. She knew from Steve that super-soldiers got headaches and backaches and that both Steve and Barnes, for incredibly different reasons, were loathe to admit to any kind of infirmity. Steve had given her plenty of practice at ignoring his protestations and plowing on and, she thought, wherever he was now, he'd approve of her using those methods to take care of Barnes.

So it wasn't until much later on, after she'd cleaned up the supplies (including burning the bloody bandaging and swabs and flushing the ashes down the toilet) and then cleaned their weapons, their 'battle gear,' and her person, in that order, that she was in one spot long enough for him to try to speak to her. Which had been by intent. 

"Carter?" 

"Hm?" she looked up from where she was digging through her toiletries kit for her lip balm. 

"Thank you."

She smiled. "You're welcome." 

The next morning was horrible for both of them; they were short sleep, Barnes was in pain, and she'd developed a sore knee from getting knocked to the ground in the fight in Searcy that had stiffened up overnight. They made ready to go -- bandages changed, hair brushed, everything to make them look like a normal couple on a road trip -- and packed the car before going over to the Days Inn and making use of their full amenities and lax diligence. There was nothing on the national news sites about anything in Arkansas when she checked on her tablet, but they overheard the conversation at another table discussing a shootout near the Searcy Airport, the speakers debating whether it had been terrorism or gang warfare, neither being considered likely. 

They had no idea where they would need to go next, but staying in Conway until they did was not an option, so the discussion was about where to go to figure that out. The best options, Barnes felt, were either to go back to St. Louis or on to Oklahoma City, both large enough cities to get lost in for a bit and neither required tolls to get there. Oklahoma City was closer, but St. Louis was closer to more places, especially if they had to go back east. 

"And there's probably no better place to ditch the car than East St. Louis," Barnes added wryly. 

It was a reference she didn't get until the following night, after the trip north. They'd stayed the first night in a slightly run-down hotel of the sort they'd frequented and mostly caught up on sleep; it was a single double bed, but there was no awkwardness as they both ended up falling asleep in their clothes. The following day, they took care of some supply replenishment and spent quality time nursing coffees at a Starbucks and using the internet. Come dark, Barnes drove them to a used car dealership on a low-traffic street and they repeated the performance from Ohio. The new vehicle was an SUV, one of a dozen on the lot. While she'd been transferring the bags, Barnes had attached the license plate he'd stolen in Arkansas to the SUV's rear. He'd taken someone's front license plate out of the Days Inn lot, explaining that Arkansas didn't require a license plate in the front, just the rear, so it might not be noticed or acted upon promptly as it would be in another state. And then they drove both vehicles to East St. Louis, the crime capital of the country, to ditch the car in what had probably once been an industrial zone but was now open fields of overgrown grass and the ruins of a couple of factory-shaped buildings. 

"It'd probably be stripped to the frame by dawn if we left it," Barnes mused as he poured gasoline in the cabin. "But no point in taking chances."

Wiping fingerprints was a straightforward operation, especially after she'd learned to be mindful about what she touched wherever she was. But Barnes had bled in the car and while she'd cleaned it well enough to pass inspection by the naked eye, Barnes assured her that there were chemicals that could find the blood regardless and machines that could identify it as his. As a law enforcement officer, she felt conflicted by this information -- she should be glad of it, but right now, it just made life more complicated. 

They drove back across the bridge to Missouri and to a hotel they'd scoped out on the internet, a hole-in-the-wall location that seemingly catered to those who'd used all of their resources to get this far. They'd taken a room for a week, muttering vaguely about seeking treatment at Barnes-Jewish Hospital to the receptionist. Peggy didn't make a crack about it possibly being necessary because this Barnes was looking worse for wear. The advantage of being relatively near the hospital was that there were plenty of drug stores and pharmaceutical supply stores and places to buy uniforms, so whether she could buy what she needed or if she had to dress like a nurse to sneak into the hospital to take -- or both -- she would not have to travel far. 

But for the time being, they could get by on what they had and then food from the many area restaurants that catered to hospital staff and patients' families with copious advertisements for lunch specials and cheap fare. Barnes didn't pretend he was not in pain, which was a relief to her because it would mean fewer arguments as she had no plans to let him carry on as though he were fine. Their most important tasks involved no physical labor, at least, and Barnes could sit with the various laptops without too much discomfort. He didn't mind not leaving the room more than once per day; the sequestration wasn't the same as idleness and the quiet was companionable and possibly even restorative for them both. The future was loud and bright and confusing and chaotic and that was without going from HYDRA cell to HYDRA cell halfway across the country. Their temporary home was spare, if not quite bare, and the sirens and street noises that came through the windows was enough of a gentle reminder that they were not alone. 

She had gotten familiar enough with both laptops and Windows that she could navigate around the important programs and open folders in Explorer, so once Barnes had deemed the machines free of traps and cracked any passwords that prevented access, she could do her fair share of the research. By mutual agreement, she left the scientific business to Barnes -- she understood none of it -- and instead focused on what did make sense: logistics and supply, about which they seemed to have an awful lot. During the war and then even more afterward, tracking bad guys by what they moved to and fro and then how they did it got her more leads than cracking heads or breaking noses ever had. "The devil is truly in the details," she told Barnes, who was not disbelieving, but maybe a little skeptical that they could find the time device by tracking HYDRA's shipments of toilet tissue.

But logistics and supply were not so greatly changed in the twenty-first century, which had in part been her reason for focusing on it. The getting of things and the moving of them from where they had been gotten to where they were needed had felled more than one empire and broken more than one army. Teleportation had not been invented yet, so until that point, all supply lines led to Rome. Or HYDRA's spare time device, as the case might be.

They spent the first few days trying to make sense of what they'd taken from Searcy, which turned out to be "a lot." The organization of the files was not, according to Barnes, terribly complicated, but it was heavily coded, both in the cryptological sense and in the 'HYDRA shorthand for whatever it was' sense. Barnes had some fluency with both, but Peggy was definitely the experienced analyst of the two and the system they'd settled on was Barnes triaging the data and sorting it into electronic piles for her to mold into something recognizable. Which was both efficient and flawed -- her missing seventy years meant that many things Barnes had flagged as important required a full explanation or an hour searching the internet or both.

On the fourth day, it was warm for the season and sunny and, feeling a little trapped, she told Barnes she wanted to take a walk. To her surprise, instead of reminding her to take one of the phones with her, he asked if he could join her. So the two of them went out with their sunglasses on and him in his ballcap and spent a few hours in Forest Park instead of walking through the city streets, which she'd done on their previous daily excursions for food. He offered his arm, as he might have done in the Forties, and she took it and they _strolled_. It was both relaxing and ridiculous, two time-tossed old soldiers sauntering around a park at mid-day as if they were sweethearts and not taking a break from vigilante activity. As if Barnes were not the most legendary assassin of the time and would be wanted by this government as well as many others had they proof of his deeds. 

"I think I'm most surprised by the fashion," she said apropos of nothing as they turned around so as to avoid being caught in the fusillade of photographs being taken on the Victorian Bridge. "If I'd thought about the far future at all, I would have said that it seems reasonable for cars to get fancier and technology to find a way to make telephones portable. But I would never have predicted that people would get more naked."

Barnes laughed, rusty but full until he was sharply reminded of his ribs. 

"I'm quite serious," she insisted. "I'm glad ladies can wear trousers in all situations without a raised eyebrow now, but... I still can't walk down the street without feeling like I'm seeing people in their underwear or on their way to a risqué costume party. It all feels so terribly informal, like the world decided to fetch the newspaper from the front lawn in its bathrobe but kept on going instead of turning back inside."

Truth be told, she missed being able to dress 'properly.' There had been plenty of times that trousers would have been more convenient, but there was comfort in the familiarity in stockings and skirts, her own battle armor in her own fight. Once upon a time, in her own time, she'd always known what her outfit and appearance said about her to others and she'd put effort into it saying the things that she wanted to communicate. Here and now, it was a language she barely understood and spoke badly, mostly by parroting others and not always sure she had the accent on the proper syllable. There seemed to be no rules whatsoever, but that could not be true -- the future was laissez-faire about so much, but human nature was human nature and she was still judged by her appearance.

"They stopped cutting my hair short in the late Sixties," Barnes said almost haltingly, but he gave her a rueful smile when she looked over. "I haven't gotten used to it yet."

"You could cut it," she pointed out, leaning into him to avoid a woman running with a three-wheeled stroller like some kind of wheelbarrow race. "I'm no dab hand with clippers, but I know a straight line when I see one."

She'd wondered about the hair, why he kept it long when it was so hard to keep kempt and so easy to get in his face and eyes in combat. She'd never said anything though, mindful that just because Barnes was free of HYDRA's control did not mean that he could live his life by whim instead of by necessity.

"I would if I could," he admitted with a sigh. "But I can't. When Steve woke up, it started a whole new craze for the Commandos. I cut it all off after I got free, but someone actually told me that I looked like Bucky Barnes -- seventy years of being forgotten, now I get recognized on the street. The hair's a pain, but it keeps me under the radar."

"Well," she reasoned with a good-natured sigh. "At least no one will confuse you with a woman from behind."

The look she got back in return made her double over in laughter. 

The walk did them both good, she thought. To exercise, to _get out_ , to be somewhere completely unnecessary to their quest and thus almost free of it, at least for a little bit. They could not be other than who and what they were, but being those people was exhausting.

They exited the park on the south side and passed an Irish pub that offered 'famous' food to stay or go. She suggested they do the latter, but Barnes was clearly still in a good mood because he suggested they stay. "Fried chicken never travels well," he said, pointing to the sign that promised a meal of infamy.

They maneuvered the hostess into seating them in a corner booth where they could both sit with their backs to the wall. They ordered beer and she got fish and chips because it had been forever -- seventy years, at least -- and it turned out to be quite respectable for an American establishment.

On the walk back to their hotel, they passed a truck belonging to a piano moving firm that reminded her of something, but it wasn't until they'd gotten to the room that Peggy realized what.

"Specialized equipment," she said and Barnes, who'd been carefully taking off his shoes without disturbing his wounds, looked up.

"For?" he prompted warily.

"If HYDRA had wanted to track Project Rebirth through the SSR's records," she began, pushing her memories aside of how they actually had and what it had cost Abraham Erskine, "they wouldn't have gotten far if they'd looked at what we spent on chemicals. We had a dozen other projects going on, some in the same space and some in others. And, in the end, Abe Erskine never wrote down what was in the serum, not entirely.

"But the administration of that serum and then the vita-rays required machinery both purchased and purpose-built, all of it unique to Project Rebirth," she continued, sitting down on the bed to take off her own shoes. "If you had tracked those -- the electronics, the metals, the wires, the gauges -- then you would have been led, eventually, to the lab in Brooklyn."

"We need to find out what was unique to what was sent to where you found me," she concluded. "Any other HYDRA cell that is amassing the same materials is presumably doing so for the same purpose."

Barnes stood up -- carefully -- and tilted his head. "See where it goes, I guess."

They were in Chicago when where it went became, at least partially, apparent. They'd checked out of their hotel at the end of the booked week's stay, then chose to drive north instead of finding another hotel in St. Louis. There had been no fallout from Searcy, at least not of the sort that made the local news, but Peggy could tell that Barnes was getting antsy being in one place for so long, even a place as populated as St. Louis. He'd been unwilling to leave the room on the last day and so she'd walked on her own and then purchased food for them both along with the _Post-Dispatch_ and resisted the copy of the most recent _Time_ that had Steve on the cover looking handsome and formidable and, if you knew how to read his carefully bland photo-ready expressions, utterly miserable. Seeing him, even a photo of him, had made her ache badly enough to bring tears to her eyes. She _missed_ him with an acuteness she hadn't felt since the first months after his 'death.' To know that he was merely a phone call away, that she could see him any time she wanted to, could be in his arms and breathe his scent... she'd tried to convince herself that knowing he was alive was enough, that knowing that he could move on the way she had tried to was sufficient. But she'd been lying to herself, then and now. 

The only way to assuage that pain was to turn then into now and fix what she'd wrought.

Ensconced in a new hotel that was surprisingly clean on the interior for the dilapidation on the outside, they sat on their respective beds, surrounded by papers with diagrams and lists and some of Barnes's sketches and tried to reverse engineer HYDRA's supply methodology. 

"I think I've got something," Barnes said on the second afternoon in Chicago. "Power sources."

She looked up from where she'd been scribbling a list of mercury shipments. "Generators? Would that not be rather standard?"

Everything in the future seemed to run -- reliably -- on the public grid, which in turn seemed to cover even the most rural places they'd driven through. But a generator would still be on her shortest list of necessities to double-up on just in case. 

Barnes gave her half a smile, the kind she'd come to recognize as him not being happy at all with how he'd acquired what he was about to share with her. "Not these. These are special. They're hard to build, they need materials money can't always buy, and they're hard to move once they are built. They're also the closest thing HYDRA has to the Tesseract these days and that's what they'd need to move through anyone through time. You don't leave these lying around in the basement in case the lights go out. You use these as primary sources for the projects you don't want anyone to find."

She could be flip and say that HYDRA didn't want any of their cells found, but she knew what he meant. HYDRA had defended the office in Searcy fiercely, but they'd had just as soon bombed it from the sky if that had been more efficient. There were some things, however, that were not disposable at any cost. Project Rebirth's main lab had been one such asset for the SSR. And, she would bet, the Winter Soldier's suite of control mechanisms had been the equivalent for HYDRA. The machines that had preserved and imprisoned Barnes for so long had required uninterrupted power sources and absolute discretion and, presumably, one of these miraculous generators.

"Where are they, then?" 

Finding the answer to that took the both of them three days of sifting through what they'd gotten from both Springfield and Searcy. The list was far longer than she thought it would be; when Barnes had said the generators were like the Tesseract, she had expected he'd meant 'unique' and so to find out that there were more than two dozen floating around surprised her. Barnes had drawn a sketch and explained, as much as he could without understanding the science of it, why they were special if not necessarily vanishingly rare. It all seemed like magic to her and Barnes laughed when she'd said as much.

Tracking the generators was distinctly unmagical. It was blunt force research, reading every single invoice and shipping manifest, keeping lists of locations for each numbered generator and then collating those lists with what Barnes had as he did the same. It was realizing only on the second day that after 2011 the generators were shipped separately in two component parts and that's why their numbers were off. It was scarfed-down takeout food and too much coffee and one meal that absolutely had to be taken outside their room so that they had to shower and dress properly. It was the bottle of whisky Barnes returned with on the third day because that's when she found out that three of the generators had been destroyed at Camp Lehigh, which had been converted into a HYDRA facility after its Army decommissioning... and then into the eternal resting place of the would-be immortal Arnim Zola... and then razed in an attempt to murder Steve the previous year. She got properly blinkered, then handed the bottle over to Barnes, who finished it because he'd had to explain why the generators that had been in Alexandria, Virginia were no longer operational -- he'd destroyed them himself because the bank vault in which they had been stored had been his final cage and torture chamber, where HYDRA had needed to burn his returning memories of Steve out of him because he'd recognized his would-be victim. 

Barnes couldn't get drunk any more than Steve could, but she knew from Steve that enough alcohol would do _something_. With Steve, it had made him either giggly and handsy or, especially after Barnes's fall, it had made him weep. Barnes kept his hands and his tears to himself, but she could tell he was not unaffected by most of a bottle of Oban. There was a casualness to his movements that seemed almost sloppy compared to his usual efficient precision. It made her smile, in her own alcoholic haze, to see Bucky Barnes peer out from behind the curtain. She might have said that aloud as he made sure she got back from the restroom into bed intact after needing to hold on to the door jamb for a moment to keep the room from spinning. He might have kissed her forehead, or maybe she tried to kiss his. (She'd gotten very, very drunk.) 

She wasn't quite sober or steady when Barnes woke up screaming a few hours later. She left him be as much for her own safety as his dignity; he'd warned her early on, before she'd really understood, to not approach him if she wasn't sure he knew where (and when and who) he was. She waited for him to get up and stumble to the bathroom before sitting up herself and finishing the bottle of water he'd left for her. She could hear him retching, then the water running and him brushing his teeth. 

He grimaced when he saw her watching him when the door opened. "Sorry."

She gave him her most sarcastic look, probably cartoonish because she could still feel the room spin a little and she was still a bit pickled. "If we get into a war of apologies, we'll be up all night," she told him and that earned her a glorious look of exasperation and resignation that she had always learned to interpret as victory. She settled back on her pillows in regal style. Barnes, meanwhile, went back to his bed. 

But he did not sleep. She heard him tossing and turning and she could have gone back to sleep, but she was a little tipsy and little haunted by memories and very much aware of how hard Barnes was trying not to disturb her. 

So she took a deep breath, gathered her courage and a pillow and threw back the covers before she reconsidered and took the two steps between her bed and his. 

"Shove over, Sergeant," she told him when he made a noise of surprised protest. She propped herself up on the pillows already on Barnes's bed and her own, saving one to put on her lap, then reaching over to tug at Barnes's undershirt until he sat up to face her. He looked at her questioningly -- not wary, just confused. And that confusion broke her heart because anyone, including 1944's Sergeant Barnes, would have recognized what she was offering even if he would have made a comment about his best friend's girl putting the moves on him. But the 2015 version did not because it had been 1944 since anyone had extended a hand to him in anything but violence or 'maintenance.' He very possibly didn't remember comfort and he certainly didn't expect it. 

"We were outside Verdun in May of '45," she began, eyes on her hands on the pillow in her lap. "The mission had gone fine, we'd gotten what we'd come for and the only reason we weren't already most of the way back to London was that we'd had the ill fortune of trusting the OSS to give us a ride. It was bitter cold for the late spring, foggy and damp, and we were making camp at the edge of a cemetery from the _last_ war and, of all things, there was a headstone for a Private James Rogers of the Canadian Corps and I just... It hit me harder than I thought it should. But I was the leader of the Commandos and I felt I had to keep my stiff upper lip and Dum Dum Dugan would have none of it. He reminded me with no kind words that I'd gone and promoted him to Sergeant against his will and now he was going to be a damned Sergeant and that meant looking after the others, including me. 

"So he teamed the others up in pairs to keep warm and share supplies and parked me at the foot of a tree and sat down right next to me and put his arm around me and told me that I was not the first commanding officer he'd had to remind that it was okay to be human. And if the Captain could shed a tear if he had to, so could I." 

She looked up at him then, holding her hands up in a gesture that was an offer and a plea and an admission that she wasn't quite sure what she was supposed to be doing, either. He didn't react right away and she tried not to hold her breath because leaving herself exposed as she was was as terrifying as anything she'd done in the future. But then he let himself slide, with awkward gracelessness, down on the bed so that his head rested on the pillow in her lap. She closed her eyes until the stinging of imminent tears passed, resting her right hand on his head and brushing his hair behind his ear with her left because otherwise she'd have to rest it on his metal shoulder and that wouldn't do either of them any benefit. 

They fell asleep like that and she honestly didn't know who went under first. When she woke up, however, the light outside the shaded windows was bright and Barnes was typing away at one of the laptops on the table at the other end of the room. 

"Water and naproxen on the night stand," Barnes said without looking up. His voice sounded a bit rough, which only did a little to assuage her indignation that he was up and functional and her head was full of cotton and thunder.

She grunted thanks and consumed both before stumbling into the bathroom and into a too-hot shower that she briefly turned to too-cold to wake her up. Barnes knocked on the door once she turned the water off to tell her that he was going to get breakfast, which had the double blessing of allowing her to dress in the main room and not in the steamy bathroom.

"By my count there are thirteen locations with more than two generators," he said once he'd returned with two styrofoam containers of what was probably the diner across the street's breakfast special. "You can double-check me, but I think we can rule out six of them -- one of them was where I found you, three of them are in the middle of Africa where they are probably the only power sources for HYDRA's bases there, one's in Mexico in the same boat, and the last is in Worcester, Massachusetts and that's where HYDRA kept me on ice before Pierce moved back to DC and wanted me closer to hand."

The casualness of the last was so false he had trouble getting the words out, but after last night, she let it slide. Comfort looked different in daylight and Dugan had done the same for her once upon a time and she didn't want Barnes regretting letting her see his vulnerability.

"So what about the seven that are left?" she asked instead, coming to the table and sorting out the plastic cutlery and napkins while Barnes dug through the bags for the tiny thimbles of cream for the coffee. "Do we go after each in turn and hope we find the device sooner than later?"

Breakfast was pancakes with bacon and sausage and honey and jam because Barnes refused to use the imitation maple syrup that got packed along with these sorts of meals and his intransigence in this matter was oddly charming.

"I hope we can narrow it down a little more," Barnes answered, waiting, as he always did, for her to sit first. Once they'd started traveling, she'd quickly noticed how manners and customs had changed over the decades. The big things first, of course, but eventually the more subtle ones. Barnes still kept to much of what had clearly become archaic habits, had probably dusted some off for her sake, but the first time he had kept his baseball cap on while they were sitting at a restaurant, she'd nearly knocked it off his head to keep them from getting noticed. He'd laughed at her hissed warning and then he'd told her to look around -- half of the men in the place were doing the same. It still struck her as wrong, as did most of what people considered normal behavior and attire, but she'd stopped reacting to it.

Here, in the privacy of their room, Barnes had left the hat with his coat on the bed.

"If we can figure out how to sort their logistics by location instead of by item, then we can see what else they've been asking for and what we might make of it," Peggy suggested as she folded a pancake over a rasher of bacon and then sliced it. "Instead of chasing the parts around the country, let's see what comes when we stand still."

She waited until after they'd finished eating to make her suggestion, one that she'd been considering since they'd arrived in Chicago. "Why don't we work out of a public library today?"

They had been in libraries before, in St. Louis and in Cincinnati, and Barnes had mentioned using them before he'd found her. The motel rooms they stayed in provided privacy and a shelter from a world that confused and discomfited both of them, but she was starting to think that it wasn't doing either of them as much good as they thought it was. It was starting to feel like _hiding_.

Barnes gave her a look that was both curious and a little wary, like he was sure she was up to something.

"People work in them all of the time," she pointed out. "And they have wifi, which means that we can look things up directly instead of keeping lists for the next time we're in a Starbucks. It will make the work go much faster."

All of which was true, but didn't alleviate Barnes's suspicion any.

"And I might be getting a bit of cabin fever," she amended, which was close enough to the truth and got Barnes to nod agreement.

Which was how they turned up at the Sulzer Regional branch of the Chicago Public Library shortly before noon. They'd gone to a Starbucks and Barnes had looked over the Library's website before choosing a branch based on its location, hours, and what languages they offered books in other than English. Their selection was open late and featured a collection of Russian material and Barnes, with his fluent Russian skills and she with her much weaker ones could maintain situational awareness while not standing out too much.

By the time the library closed in the evening, they had eliminated three of the seven remaining HYDRA locations.

The first two had been rather quickly dispatched through a combination of Peggy's unfortunately well-honed supply ordering skills and Barnes's understanding of the modern world. Rouyn-Noranda in Quebec and Temecula in California were what Barnes called "server farms," climate-controlled remote data storage that would need a reliable and significant power source to maintain the equipment. It didn't seem like the kind of facility that HYDRA would have to go to great length to keep hidden, but Barnes assured her this was not the case. "The power companies know what a place is supposed to be and what kind of power requirements it should have," he explained over lunch, taken in the park across the street from the library. "A house or a factory sucking up that much electricity 24/7 is going to be on everyone's watch list as a terror threat -- or a drug lab, both of which invite a raid."

The third location was just as easily identified for vastly different reasons, but took the balance of the afternoon and all of the evening to strike off the list of candidates. The base outside of Weippe, Idaho had received a large supply of chemicals and solvents, the specific combinations of which Peggy recognized.

"This is where they're trying to reproduce the serum," she typed on the Notepad screen she kept open for comments they couldn't risk being overheard. They were in a quiet area set aside for studying and work, although it had gotten a little raucous after the area schools had let out, and had semi-barricaded themselves by surrounding their laptops with Russian reference books, including a Russian-French dictionary. But, still, some words were never meant to be spoken aloud even in a whisper. And these were among them. "I recognize the reagents."

Barnes seemed unsurprised, nodding almost to himself. "Steve's or mine?" he typed back on his screen.

"Both," she answered. She'd been around Project Rebirth since near its inception and she'd spent far too much time reading the notes Zola had been captured with and then what he'd offered the SSR in exchange for not being handed over for trial at Nuremberg. "There are components unique to both on the lists. But that's probably not all that they're doing there."

She brought up the PDF of a supply order -- bless HYDRA for simply taking pictures of their paperwork instead of using the confounding Excel -- and pointed out some other items that could not be explained by any kind of serum experimentation she'd been familiar with but had very obvious and unpleasant other experimental uses.

Barnes made a face. "They do lots of stuff now," he said very quietly. "And everyone there now is a volunteer."

She shuddered. Yes, Steve had been a volunteer, eager and almost desperate for the chance to prove himself. And, in theory, there could be others of similar nobility of character who would choose such an incredible and dangerous path to what they considered success. And there might be someone like Abraham Erskine working for HYDRA now, understanding that his best hopes could very well be used to create his worst nightmares. But the likelihood of all of that occurring within the clandestine havens of modern-day HYDRA...

"But are they doing what we 'hope' they are doing there?" she whispered back.

By the end of the day, they had decided likely not. The more she delved into what was going on in Weippe, the more disgusted she became and the convinced that the macabre was the only focus. Cages, diapers sized for adults, restraints of all sorts of materials, colostomy bags, quantities of sedatives that could fell a city... it was all very _Island of Doctor Moreau_. But what it _wasn't_ was Howard Stark's World of Tomorrow -- there was very little mechanical being constructed, something Barnes verified for her with his superior understanding of modern technology. This was a biology lab, to be awfully reductionist about it. Whatever HYDRA wanted that maser for that they'd dragged her into the future to figure out where she'd hidden it, it wasn't to shoot it at a human being and see what happened.

After dinner, they returned to their motel room and opened the laptops back up. They made tea and worked their way through the fudge and "retro" candy they'd picked up at a massive sweets shop on the way home and by dawn, they had their answer -- as well as the answer to a question they'd never asked.

What Prespatou in British Columbia, Gackle in North Dakota, and Norwood in Michigan's Upper Peninsula all had in common was the receipt of massive amounts of food, construction materials and equipment, and then finally weapons (Prespatou had been the final destination of most of what had gone missing from Dayton). "How to build an army base in three easy steps," Peggy mused as she tallied the quantities. "They must be expecting thousands of recruits at each."

The locations -- all to the north, in more or less isolated areas with easy access to the US-Canada border and a great distance from DC, two of which featured German-speaking communities -- were not haphazardly chosen. "Retrenching or planning something big?" she asked Barnes. 

"Could be both," he replied, getting up to pace their small space and stretch his back. "These bases are all brand-new, since SHIELD was brought down and HYDRA was exposed. Pierce was the top guy, but he wasn't the only guy and there were others with the capacity to take over. Building new bases is a good way to move resources before they get taken away and HYDRA's still got the connections to do it on the down-low."

Peggy took a sip of her tea, realizing it was cold, and put the cup down. "The materiel was moved much more recently, however, which implies both that they thought it had been safe where it had been stored as well as that it was needed when and where it was sent. Which in turn implies that something is up."

"Hammer," Barnes said, as if realizing something. 

Peggy was exhausted and was perilously close to the point that not even caramel bonbons and earl grey could keep her sharp much longer, but even so, she had no idea what Barnes was on about. "We don't have a hammer, just a screwdriver."

Barnes stared at her for a second before bursting into laughter; his ribs hadn't quite healed enough for him to go full doubled-over, but he did a fair impression. "Not that kind of hammer," he wheezed. "Hammer-the-acronym. The replacement for SHIELD."

HAMMER, an agency name chosen for its initials instead of any sort of common sense -- "You're one to talk," Barnes chided, "you're probably the one who came up with SHIELD" -- had been authorized at the start of the fiscal year in July as part of what were known as the Sokovia Accords. There was apparently some disagreement over how or if the Avengers fit into HAMMER's plans, although Barnes didn't know the specifics of it beyond that Steve was "mounting his high horse again, just begging to be shot off of it." But the bottom line of it was that there was a new sheriff in town and it behooved the bad guys to do what they needed to do before that new sheriff figured out the lay of the land. 

They both had solid arguments for and against why the time device (or devices) would be at one of those bases, ranging from the practical to the improbable: the generators could be used to hide the activity the way they were at the server farms, perhaps the maser could be used with the time device to send thousands of well-equipped modern soldiers back to a point that Schmidt would find useful... there was no evidence one way or the other. Or, rather, there might have been but neither of them were in a condition to see it. Or much of anything else.

She suggested a halt -- it was half-five and she was feeling a little delirious -- and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth and change into her pajamas. When she came out, Barnes was still at his computer, but instead of typing busily, he was staring at the screen with an expression similar to what she'd been wearing before she'd decided she'd had enough. 

"Did you find something?" she asked, mostly to make sure he knew she had come back into the room. He looked _distracted_ , which was not something he often -- ever -- was. 

"I think I know what they're doing in Modoc," he said after a pause long enough that she'd been about to repeat the question. "They're not sending anyone back. They're bringing someone _forward_."

Modoc had been the last base on the list of possibilities entirely because they hadn't been sure if was Modoc, Georgia or Modoc, South Carolina. It was the latter, they eventually figured out, but what was going on there was far less obvious than any of the others. It had office equipment, but not in quantities that suggested a place like Searcy or Springfield. It had weapons, but not the large caches of automatic rifles that had gone to Prespatou, Gackle, or Norwood; the quantities were smaller and the actual weapons were different -- Barnes said they were more defensive in nature. But why HYDRA would be reinforcing a base in the middle of nowhere that didn't seem to have much of anything of value...

She sat down on her bed and started undoing her braid. "Why do you think that? What did you find?"

Barnes sat back in his seat and exhaled loudly, rubbing his hands on his face and leaving them there. "Things I used to need."

Which was ominous enough that she got up and went over to the table and looked over Barnes's shoulder at what was on his screen. Which in turn required him to translate, not only from part numbers and abbreviations, but also what the actual full words meant. And even when she could parse out the words -- "Artificial Nutrition System" were words that were understandable on their own, just not in that combination. "Rapid aural/visual data projector" made no sense even after Barnes explained that it was a helmet configured to be a personal movie theater so that they could show him everything he'd missed while he'd been in the cryo tank and teach him whatever was needed for the mission he was to be sent on.

"Brainwashing, catching-up, mission prep, whatever you want to call it," he explained with a bleak smile. "The first ones they built made me puke every time, but the latest models didn't hurt and it was..." he broke off with a sigh. "It sounds wrong to say I enjoyed it, but I suppose I did. Only entertainment I had for seventy years."

She put her hand on his right shoulder briefly, just a touch, before stepping back. "You finding a moment of pleasure, of enjoyment, in all your years of captivity does not negate the horror of of what you went through or mean that you somehow wanted the rest of it. It does not make you bad for thinking it. It was a moment of grace and I'll be glad on your behalf that you found it if you won't be."

Barnes looked up at her and gave her a tiny smile, one she translated into him appreciating the sentiment but that he wasn't quite ready to buy into it. Any sort of retort she might have had, however, was shattered by an appallingly big and loud yawn on her part. Barnes laughed and pointed toward her bed.

"Go," he exhorted. "I'm just going to finish this."

Which she highly doubted would be any time soon, but recognized the futility of the argument.

"If you are still awake when I get up, Sergeant," she warned as she rolled to the side to get under the covers without getting up, "I am going to knock you out myself."

"Yes, ma'am."

When she woke up a few hours later to use the toilet -- all that tea taking its revenge -- Barnes was indeed passed out on his bed, but she suspected he hadn't been there long. He was still sleeping heavily enough not to stir at the noise, which he always did except in the days after he'd gotten injured in Searcy. She debated making tea and going back to work, but she really was exhausted still and went back to bed instead.

The next time she woke up, it was almost noon and Barnes was back at the laptop.

"I slept, I swear," he said once she stirred.

Face hidden by the sheet, she smiled, but schooled her features before sitting up. He wouldn't like to know that she'd seen him asleep -- less because he would have once again exposed his vulnerable underbelly to her than it would mean he'd so thoroughly lost awareness of his environment. So instead she grunted a noise that hopefully sounded like skepticism and went to shower.

Barnes didn't want to go back to the library, but he was willing to at least go out for meals, which she took as enough of a victory. Over the course of the day, he explained more about what he'd found in Modoc -- and what he hadn't found. Many of the implements that had been needed to support and maintain the Winter Soldier were present, but one crucial component was not: the 'chair,' a torture device Barnes described with appalling calm that she didn't call him on because how else could he even speak of what that machine had done to him over and over again except with such detachment?

"If a chair had been there, there would have been more options," he said as they walked back from lunch (breakfast), pausing so that the elevated train overhead could rattle past. "Whoever they're setting this up for won't need to be wiped. Which means it's nothing crazy like one of the Avengers or the President or something wild like that."

"Three cheers for it not being that madness," she said sourly. "Could they be conditioning someone else? One of the volunteers from Weippe?"

Barnes shrugged. "Maybe, but odds are that whoever they've got out there is a volunteer and doesn't need the brainwashing. But if they bring someone from the past, then they'll have to catch them up and maybe nurse them a little -- we don't know what kind of shape you were in when you arrived here. If you're going purely by efficiency, HYDRA's methods with me were better than what SHIELD did for Steve."

It sounded plausible enough -- there was nothing explicitly contradicting it, at least -- but the possibilities of who HYDRA could be intending to bring forward were limited at best, she felt. The list of HYDRA principals still alive from the war could be counted on one hand and none of them were actually that important. There were later leaders who had shepherded HYDRA through the post-war rebuilding, perhaps, but Peggy had no idea who any of them were -- although it would be good to find out for when she got back to her own time.

But while she was thinking about the future-past, Barnes was still thinking of the past-past.

"It could be me they're going to get," he said once they were back in their room. He looked sick at the thought. "They don't have to wipe me to make me useful to them again. They can just shoot me in the head and so long as I'm still breathing, they can still swap me with a more... _obedient_ model. It's not like they haven't been trying to get me back."

She set down her bag and turned to him. "They _are_ trying to get you back," she agreed because, without anything but his own word on the matter, she believed him. She knew first-hand how tense things had been when Steve had gone rogue looking for the 107th, how much trouble she'd been in, how much effort would have been put in to retrieving him had he been captured. She also knew how hard it would have been for Steve to walk away from the SSR after the end of the war had he lived ('lived') to see it -- he'd been government property above and beyond the "duration plus six months" contract he'd signed to enlist. And that had been the SSR; what HYDRA had done to Barnes to mold him and then keep him... _of course_ they wanted him back and were undoubtedly expending tremendous resources to do so. "But I don't believe that you -- any version of you -- is meant for the machine in Modoc." 

Barnes stood in place, watching her. She didn't know if he was bracing for a fight or hoping she would give him something to believe in. 

"As you said, all they'd have to do is disable you from afar, then throw you back in time to get the younger version," she went on, taking off her shoes. "But the first thing they actually did do with one of these time devices is rummage in the past and dig _me_ up -- the wrong me at that -- so that they could find their maser. Which speaks to that being their primary objective, however valuable you are to their plans

"Also, and I can imagine it hardly felt like it at the time, but you were never fully under their control," she continued, turning to him and fixing him with a look so he'd not protest. "They needed to constantly restrain you and torture you into some semblance of obedience. The facility in Modoc has no such capacity and I cannot believe HYDRA, whoever is running it now, would be so optimistic about your younger version's docility as to risk not being prepared. There are undoubtedly complete records somewhere of all of the times they had to _recondition_ you and, even if those have been lost, institutional memory and your year of freedom -- which you have spent on vengeance -- would be a sharp-enough reminder. 

"The Winter Soldier might have been the jewel in HYDRA's crown and they would gladly spend much blood and treasure on regaining that most precious instrument. But this is about something else."

Barnes stayed rooted to his spot, still watching her with a protest on his lips and something hard in his eyes that wasn't aimed at her.

"Besides," she said, standing up and going for the electric kettle. "I've watched them shoot at you several times now and they are certainly not shooting to wound."

With that, she went into the bathroom to fill the kettle and let Barnes have a moment to sort himself out. He'd been the hunter before, during, and after his captivities, but it was not the reversal of that that had him so unsettled. It was what awaited him should HYDRA get him back in their clutches. She strongly suspected that should that happen, he had no intention of surviving the encounter and giving HYDRA anything to misuse again.

"Do we leave for Modoc directly," she asked as she came back out with the filled kettle and set it on the corner of the bureau so she could plug it in. "Or do we put some thought into first rather than en route? And what do we do with the other locations? Is there a way to send them to Steve so his Avengers can take care of it without having it lead directly to us?"

Barnes had gotten as far as taking off his coat and looked up from rifling through his pockets. "Are you suggesting we've been ill-prepared, Agent Carter?"

His tone made it clear he knew what she'd been doing -- up to and through changing the topic. Which was fine with her, she hadn't been mindful of his feelings in that way.

"I'm suggesting that we've got one shot at getting back in time without appealing for help and you are quite fond of 'shoot first and ask questions later.'"

She rooted through the teabag tin for a licorice one, then tossed the tin to Barnes so he could take what he wanted. Or do what he actually did do and grab whatever was on top.

"We need to make a supply run," he admitted, coming over to drop his teabag in his mug and put the tin back where they kept it, which was in the blue duffel bag. They had been in the hotel for a few days, but hadn't unpacked in any meaningful way; they never did. They could be cleared out in three minutes and still have time to wipe down the surfaces to erase fingerprints. "And some items on the list aren't for sale at Wal-Mart."

She shrugged. "A good thing we have HYDRA's supply chain to hand," she said. "And with a touch of finesse, we can get what we need without sticking the place up first."

It was overly simplistic to say that the hard work had been done now that they'd figured out where they were going. They still didn't know what awaited them, which was hardly unimportant, and they still didn't know what HYDRA's true plans were for the other bases -- or for the maser.

They bought the daily newspapers in whatever city they were in, but that was almost more a creature comfort than a way of staying abreast of what was going on. Newspapers were printed daily still, but their websites updated constantly to reflect the changing stories of the day and then there were news websites that were unaffiliated with any paper and just aggregated other sources. That was where any true research had to be done. Peggy left Barnes behind one day to go back to the library and, after puttering about on her own for an hour, seek assistance from a librarian on how to search archives on the internet. After her lesson, she put it to use looking up "HYDRA," which returned so many results she had to then figure out how to winnow out what she didn't need.

Online research was overwhelming, she decided, in good and bad ways -- access to so much material was a marvel, but it was also an invitation to poor analysis. She'd had to do much more with much less in her native time, but she'd felt more confident in what she'd come away with then than now. Part of it was simply that she disliked not handling actual paper and seeing how things fit together by _how they fit together_. It was all very nice to click on a link and get a new document or an old article, but she felt like she had to read much more slowly and more carefully when it was on the screen.

Also, it all seemed so terribly insecure -- computers were far less safe than vaults or even a locked file cabinet. The internet was an endless series of open windows and doors whose locks would never hold. HYDRA had thought they were being clever by not putting things on the internet, but she and Barnes had simply walked away with a couple of handfuls of plastic and metal and now had most of HYDRA's supply chain for the last five years. It had taken them only a few days to figure out where their most critical bases were and what was going on in each and while yes, she and Barnes were superb at what they did, there was something to be said for keeping piles of paper in locked boxes in individual sites when it came to hiding evidence of one's criminal activities.

After a walk and then a lunch that was a heavily-laden polish sausage from a street cart, she went to a different library to use their computers to do more searching. She wanted to muddy her internet footsteps as much as possible and Barnes had told her that switching locations and computers would be sufficient for the task. At the second branch, she fine-tuned the research from earlier, following leads that were sometimes dead ends and sometimes possibilities. HYDRA's activities weren't always reported honestly -- it was easier not to panic the public than to say that the factory explosion hadn't been a gas leak. But she had spent a war translating innocuous news reports and encrypted adverts and the skill was still applicable in the twenty-first century. From the supply paperwork, she knew where HYDRA was and if there happened to be a police raid in the area because of illegal labor practices or if a fire with no foul play suspected happened to burn down a location, well, she knew one side or the other had taken action. There had been some activity since her arrival in this time and she took notes (on paper) to see what might have been affected, but without the master lists back at the hotel, there was no way to sense a pattern besides geographic and that seemed to be somewhat haphazard. 

On the way back, she stopped at a Mariano's market and bought fruit and prepared green salads in plastic containers and a rotisserie chicken and potato salad and little tubs of greek yogurt, which she'd been introduced to in St. Louis and had come to enjoy quite a bit. 

"I didn't find anything to eliminate Bee as a target," she told Barnes, who was lying on the floor -- with a pistol to hand -- and doing some sort of calisthenics when she returned. The bruises from Searcy had faded, but he was still a little tender in the ribs, although he would not admit it. "So we can still do our shopping there if we desire. "

Bee, Virginia was a tiny unincorporated speck on the map. In that speck, along Route 80, was a drinking establishment that was an apparently legitimate enterprise at the front of the house and HYDRA's version of a petrol filling station in the back. It didn't have a full armory or large supplies of anything, but it had small supplies of almost everything. Including petrol. Barnes's theory had been that it was far enough from DC to be the final replenishing point for units en route to the capital -- or the first one for anyone fleeing. Which also meant that if they were recognized there, it would look like they were on their way to DC and not down to South Carolina. She wasn't sure of the tortured reasoning, but it made Barnes happy and it was practical in all other matters, so she had promised to perform due diligence on it as far as police blotters and other relevant interests might go.

"Also, HYDRA is either exceptionally clumsy these days or they are diverting attention to their activities in South America on purpose," she added, placing the groceries on the small shelf until they could clear the table for dinner. "I'm rather disappointed in Steve for falling for it -- the Avengers just got back from Bolivia after a trip to Venezuela last month. With a haul of prisoners and weapons, apparently, but even from here they look like they've been laid out like Christmas crackers."

Barnes sat up and grinned. "He might've realized, but he doesn't have much more control now than he did back then. We went on plenty of missions we realized weren't going to pan out, either because he couldn't say no to the Colonel or wouldn't say no to you."

She shot him a stern look. "We both know that's not how it worked, Sergeant," she said, stepping over his outstretched legs to get to her bed.

"We both know that's _exactly_ how it worked, Agent Carter," he replied with a wink as he stood up.

"You're in a fine mood," she said once she'd taken off her shoes. "While I was trying to narrow my search results down from fifteen thousand, what were you up to?"

He went over to his bed and handed her a pile of sketches. A few were blueprints, but most were illustrations of the various sides of the house in Modoc that was allegedly a HYDRA base and then some interiors of what looked like an underground facility. "It was converted into a base within a month of the place up where I found you, so I took a chance on them using the same plans and recreated the layout there. It wouldn't be the first time they've copied themselves -- it's easier to mass-produce construction than do customized work."

She sat down on the bed so she could look more closely at the sketches. "These are of the bunker?" She didn't remember what the place looked like very well; most of what she'd seen outside of her cell and the path to the interrogation room had been shrouded in smoke and filtered through her fear and determination to escape. She'd felt like a rat in a maze then and looking at it from above instead of from the rat's perspective was disorienting. The interrogation room was marked and she could trace her path back to where she'd likely been held, tapping it with her fingertip thoughtfully.

"It's a pretty standard layout for a HYDRA base hidden in a civilian residential area," Barnes went on, sitting down next to her so that he could point out spots. "The generators were here. It's lead-lined; you need some kind of insulation. I can't guarantee they'll be in the same place in Modoc, even if everything else in the same. We'll just have to look for the reinforced walls. The rest of it will be there, too, although they might have the time device locked away in its own spot."

"Our problem remains the human element," Peggy said as she stood up and went over the table to clear it off, Barnes following. "It doesn't look heavily staffed from the deliveries, but who knows what we might be missing. And if this is to be where we leave this time, then we have to be careful about how we go about it. Which means not getting shot or stabbed or otherwise punctured, in case I'm not being clear. We won't have a few days to patch ourselves up before going back if we need those generators to operate the device."

Barnes looked like he wanted to protest his innocence, but thought better of it. "We can probably work in a few days' on-site reconnaissance."

After dinner, she opened up her laptop to finish up the research she'd done during the day, matching what the internet had told her with what HYDRA's own files revealed. The bases that had been dealt with by the law had not been crucial ones for the most part, although the one in Vermont had served the same kind of function that Searcy had and if anyone there had survived and was talking, the good guys might be able to get something useful out of it. The bases HYDRA was evacuating on their own were also mostly minor, but there were a couple of notable exceptions that seemed to indicate that their personnel and materiel were being transferred to one of three new bases. Whatever was going on in Gackle, Prespatou, and Norwood, it was large and undoubtedly not benign. 

Barnes, meanwhile, was compiling shopping lists: what they would need to attack the base at Modoc and also what they would want to bring with them when they traveled back in time. The latter list, when she saw it, was extremely pragmatic, but also a perverted sort of time capsule: it wasn't the best elements of the future or the most useful or the most wondrous -- there were no tablets or cell phones or comfortable dress shoes. There were antibiotics and "skin glue" and types of high explosive and kevlar and the accouterments of a silent war. Peggy might be returning to her old life, but Barnes was setting himself up as a wraith of vengeance meant to haunt and hunt HYDRA with whatever advantage he could muster.

She'd understood what he'd said the first night, that he wanted to go back and stop HYDRA from becoming what they'd become, but she hadn't comprehended what that would entail for him. And, to her discredit, she hadn't thought about it since she'd been in a position to understand. He was giving himself over to an unending war, one he undoubtedly intended to die fighting -- and die alone. He wasn't going to rent a room in Brooklyn, visit his family, commute to work the way she did, and go home at the end of the day. He was going to live as he did now, in the shadows, rootless and friendless and actively avoiding anything and everyone who'd ever known Bucky Barnes.

"We'll need the lists of HYDRA post-war leaders and bases," she told him rather than say that he didn't have to do it this way. "Also, some communist spies would be lovely -- give us cover for what would otherwise be wild-goose chases. And the reports on Steve's likely crash site, to narrow down that search a bit." 

Barnes grunted acknowledgement. "And money. That might have to be a straight-up smash-and-grab from a jewelry store. Can't exactly carry cash with us and none of my bearer bonds go back that far."

"I wouldn't worry too much about funding," she said, looking up. "I'm quite sure Howard will be willing to foot part of the bill for pre-emptively taking revenge on his murderers. Possibly all of it, although I suspect some creative accounting at the SSR can get us more than enough cash on hand. But he's already funding expeditions to look for Steve -- telling him where to go and that we'll find him alive will keep the purse strings quite lax."

Howard would probably be entirely on board from the moment she told him she'd visited the future, let alone who and what she'd brought back with her. He wouldn't care about Barnes's role itself; the Winter Soldier had merely been another part of the pistol HYDRA had held and Howard would understand that. But what he would understand even more thoroughly would be Barnes's very personal need for revenge and redemption. Howard blamed himself for Abe. He blamed himself for Steve, which was ridiculous. He blamed himself for so many things that he was arrogant enough to take credit (and blame) for and finding out that HYDRA was still alive and thriving, that the toys he'd spirited away would be used against those they loved, that he would be working for the very organization he'd strove to destroy, let alone what they had done to Barnes himself... no, Howard would want in on this and she didn't think anyone had the power to say no to him and have him listen.

Barnes made a face and shook his head. "I don't--"

"I know you don't," she cut him off because apparently she was up to this argument right now. "And I'm going to tell you once and for all that what you _don't_ doesn't matter. If you think I am going to shake your hand and wish you well once we get back to 1946, Sergeant, you've got another thing coming.

"You and I are bound together, James Barnes, by what we know about the future and how we have shaped it. And by the man we are going to save the future for now -- and dig out of the ice once we are back. You do not get to disappear into the mist and leave me to fight on my own while you nurse your vengeance in private. I won't pretend for a moment that they have hurt me -- or anyone else --- the way they have hurt you. But I will _not_ let you fight this battle alone. And if you think Steve is going to be any more willing to do so this time than last..."

Barnes got up and walked to the far end of the room, which wasn't all that far away, and kept his back to her. She could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was upset, but what sort of upset was impossible to know.

"You shouldn't run from him forever," she began again, this time more quietly than the shrill note she'd ended on. "You _can't_ run from him forever. He will chase you then as he is now and it doesn't matter if you're a better fighter or if he's half-frozen and creaks when he walks. He will go where you lead him because you are his brother and you are all he has for a family and he loves you. And you would destroy yourself rather than accept the fact that whatever you did, whatever HYDRA _made_ you do, that doesn't matter to him. I cannot let you do that, not for Steve's sake and not for yours.

"You deserve peace and I would give much for you to have it. But until you can have peace, let me help you wage war. Let _Steve_ help you. Let anyone who wants to do good in the world help you because that is how we will win this fight."

Barnes turned to her and she could see that the sort of upset he was was fear and despair commingled.

"Besides," she went on before he could give his emotions voice, "provided I haven't been fired from the SSR for going AWOL, I think we should make use of what I can get through official channels to better direct our unofficial actions. We won't have numbers, so efficiency will matter more and you trawling all over the globe by train or steamer looking for clues isn't going to be the best way to do anything."

Which was true in all of its facets, but did not address Barnes's distress.

"I know you're not really running from Steve," she continued. "You're running from the Bucky Barnes you think you'll see in his eyes. In all of our eyes, although I don't know why you're giving me credit for accepting you as you really are and you won't extend it to anyone else. Steve is no fool and he's not that kind of idealist and he never failed to recognize how much you'd already changed by the time you became his team sergeant. You know that, too, but I think you've forgotten it in the golden haze you've wrapped your memories of him up in.

"But the boy from Brooklyn who didn't want your protection grew into the man who asked you to teach him how to wage war and trusted you to kill for him. The Bucky Barnes in that man's eyes was no innocent and I think it would do your heart good to remember that he loved you no less for that."

And now, finally finished, she waited.

Barnes closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a moment before opening then again. "I'm going for a run," he said and she nodded, turning in her seat so that she was facing her laptop again. This was how they had to function, tethered to each other as they were. Arguments were dropped, not won. They could not have the sort of shattering fights that meant days of lingering anger, they could not avoid each other, they could not have the sort of privacy that allowed one to nurse their wounds unseen. They could take breaks from each other, brief ones disguised as exercise or errand, and pretend that those breaks were as restorative as they needed to be. Usually they were. 

"Take a phone," she reminded him. "And be careful of cars in the dark."

By the time he got back an hour or so later, sweaty and flushed and visibly less tense, she'd managed to focus on what they needed to do and not her memories and not Steve and not wondering what sort of pain Barnes lived with that he spent so much energy running from the only source of sure comfort he could rely on. 

"I think we've got four options for Bee," she began as he was untying his sneakers. "Ranging from simple con to outright raid. For health and safety reasons, I would prefer the one in which we do not draw our weapons unless prompted to, but I will defer to your expertise."

Barnes wiped his face with one sleeve. "Honestly, I'm more than willing to do this without shooting if you can swing it. What've you got?" 

As he stood there, a sodden mess, she ran through an overview of what she'd come up with. The simple con, her preferred option, was just that: they had enough knowledge of and souvenirs from the previous HYDRA cells they'd raided to plausibly equip themselves as fellow travelers and simply use the way-station at Bee the way it was intended and select their items and go. She would lead and Barnes, less skilled at pretending to be someone else, would either provide security from a distance or come along as bag-carrier. The next least aggressive option was the same, but with Barnes tagging along and showing his hand (possibly literally) as soon as she was through the door. There were variations on that theme -- Barnes coming in separately as a raider, for example -- but every single one save for the forthright robbery began with her knocking on the front door and hoping for the best. 

When she was finished, Barnes had a thoughtful look on his face. "Are you as good as you think you are?"

It was a question more than it was a challenge. 

"With this, yes," she told him honestly. "I've bullshitted my way through many doors and I don't think my calendar issues will be a hindrance here -- they might actually be a help. I know more about HYDRA's origins than anyone in Bee does and this is the sort of organization that venerates its history."

In the end, it was perhaps a help, but something to make the job easier and not to make it possible at all. Small talk as she waited at the bar for her story to be checked out, having shown up with a half-melted, demagnetized ID and a plausible-but-unverifiable story of having survived the assault in Searcy by virtue of hiding in the utilities room where they'd kept the extra tanks for the water cooler. She somewhat bashfully explained that she was third generation HYDRA as her grandfather had been one of the men to covertly convert Camp Lehigh from SSR base to HYDRA fortress, which was why, she hinted, she'd been tasked with such a delicate operation. Hence showing up with a list of required items complete with their inventory code numbers on no notice. She dropped little tidbits that made her sound like born HYDRA royalty, which was as appealing as nectar to a bee for HYDRA converts. She might have connections to the Supreme HYDRA yes, but what she could really do was bestow legitimacy upon them for their own faith -- her recognition of their value and dedication was an affirmation they craved. It was much easier than having to 'relive' the assault on Searcy from the perspective of the assaulted, which had been her Plan A going in. 

What was definitely a help was that she'd put thought into her appearance, that she'd taken to heart what she'd learned about the future and then discarded it. She'd walked into the bar in Bee wearing simple-but-noticeable makeup and a knee-length skirt and carrying a purse because now that women could and did wear trousers all of the time, a skirt or dress acquired new meaning. She had noticed that she'd been treated differently -- better -- on days she'd worn dresses, even casual dresses best suited for country picnics and it worked in Bee, too. She was treated like a proper lady, even at the beginning, when there'd undoubtedly been weapons trained on her while they were figuring out who she might be. 

The rest was simple tradecraft and the fruit borne of having come of age in a very different time. She took out a tissue and blew her nose, apologizing for the necessity, while she was waiting for her bona fides to be established; it was a gesture meant to show vulnerability. She had the innate timing to naturally pause before doors so that they'd be held for her; it emphasized her ladylike comportment which in turn emphasized her weakness. And, not least, she'd convinced Barnes to wait in the car -- the hardest task of the operation -- because coming in alone as a woman would make her far less of a threat even if nobody recognized her companion as the erstwhile Winter Soldier. 

Once she'd been established as legitimate, she slowly hardened the steel beneath her skin and turned her graceful manners into good breeding and not demureness. She was HYDRA, after all, and she'd proven her worth a thousand times over and she was there to collect necessities for a mission so secret its existence hadn't been transmitted on normal channels. They would hold the doors for her because she'd earned the privilege. 

Barnes joined her as the men tasked with retrieving the items on her list had started to make an impressive pile on the table next to where she and Matthew, the manager of HYDRA operations in Bee, waited. By coming in at that point and no earlier, he was established as a lackey and not a person who mattered. It even de-emphasized his obvious physical power because if he'd been qualified to be her bodyguard, he'd have been in there with her from the start. 

"Are you still put out that they asked me who the other set of equipment was for?" she asked with a grin as they pulled into the parking lot of a Starbucks in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

"I'm not put out," Barnes replied sourly. "I'm baffled."

She laughed at the words and at the memory -- the look on his face at the time had been delightful. "I thought I heard the sound of an ego deflating. Maybe it was just a tire."

Barnes only growled as he went to the trunk of their latest SUV to make sure that everything was safely and innocuously stowed. The people at Bee had thoughtfully packed everything in camouflaged containers -- their rifles and ammunition were in a diaper box, the body armor in a giant plastic bag with Old Navy printed on the side, etc. -- and everything they'd gotten at Wal-Mart was still in its packaging. 

Starbucks was as much for the coffee as for the free wifi -- she'd hit her post-mission adrenaline crash somewhere around the state line and was exhausted. Barnes did most of the necessary research, which was for a place to sleep for the night as well as the usual news-hunting. He found them a hotel near the University of North Carolina's Charlotte campus that was clean if very spare and offered no towels but free wifi. They ate dinner at a Waffle House crowded with half-drunk and very-drunk students giddy about some school team's victory over a rival and then returned to their room to begin planning both the attack on the facility in Modoc as well as what they needed to do to prepare for what would hopefully be the mission _after_ Modoc: the derailment of HYDRA back in 1946. And this time, Peggy was taking a more active role in that project to make sure that it didn't turn into a way for Barnes to disappear once they went back.

Early on, they'd started compiling information in notebooks, writing in pencil and ink on paper what they would need to know about the past-turned-future. Names, dates, places, incidents, possible allies, probable enemies, anything they could think of that might matter. They worked to complete those as well as preparing manifests for the shoulder packs they would carry on the journey through time -- the notebooks, appropriate clothes, weapons just in case, and gold and diamond jewelry that Barnes had bought in Chicago to be traded for cash because while Howard Stark would undoubtedly help them out once they found him, they still needed to be somewhere that could happen and neither of them had any idea where they'd wind up back in 1946 or even if they would do so together. 

Barnes had told her where he'd been in 1946 and in what circumstances, in case they did get separated and he was swapped out with his younger self. He'd made her memorize the procedures for getting him out of the cryo tank safely, even as he wrote them in all of the notebooks. His words made it sound like he wouldn't mind fighting his way free of his captors and rendering immediate retribution against those who'd harmed him, but she knew that he was really quite terrified of winding up back in the tank. And there was nothing she could do to assuage his very justifiable fear. She didn't remember her arrival at all, whether her coat and purse had come with her or if she'd appeared in Havre de Grace or been transported from somewhere else, but her watch had still been on her wrist and they both agreed that that made it likely that everything else she'd worn and been carrying had come through, too. 

"So we'll hold hands," she said, closing her eyes and letting the burn fade because she'd been staring at the screen for hours. "And you can hopefully get counted as my luggage."

They stole a car from a parking lot on the UNCC campus to drive down to Modoc and get a first look in-person. Truthfully, there was very little to see -- a large, ramshackle, white-painted house right on SC-23 that had seen better days but still maintained an air of dignity through careful maintenance and a small flower garden.

"Join HYDRA, fight for a new world order by planting gardenias?" Barnes mused as they looked over the video footage they'd shot of the place. "I wonder what the letters home say about that. 'Dear Mom, today in murder camp, I learned about the dangers of over-watering my annuals.'"

The more interesting footage had come from the other cameras they'd brought. From Bee, they'd brought a ground-penetrating radar, which seemed as magical to her as the laptop had once been, to confirm the presence of underground tunnels and rooms. And some electro-something sensors the explanation of which Barnes couldn't simply enough for her to understand beyond that they could see how much electricity was being used both above and below ground.

"It looks close enough to the Maryland place that I'm willing to take the leap," Barnes said, pausing the video of the radar images and digging around on the bed for the pile of sketches he'd made of the Havre de Grace base. "You see that line that goes there -- same thing here. And the fortified room with the generators looks like it might be in the exact same spot."

The original plan of attack from Maryland would stand as a basis for the sequel in Modoc, with several alterations that Peggy insisted upon. Starting with Barnes wearing a kevlar protective shirt under his battle costume and allowing her to try to work her way in the front door the easy way, as she had in Bee. Barnes was understandably much less enthusiastic about the latter than the former, which he acceded to without more than an eye-roll.

"I'm not going to talk my way into letting us fire up the time device with their assistance," she cut off his protests. "But I think having the fight start at a later point than 'at the front door' is to our advantage. If we can get in and even get downstairs by flying false colors... it'll be less work and it's a big enough job as it is."

It took a few rounds, but she won in the end, with concessions. First and most important being that Barnes would not wait in the car but instead accompany her from the beginning. He readily agreed that his playing the lackey was best -- "and not too far from the truth, so it's in my acting wheelhouse" -- but he would do so from her side.

The rest would go as they had gone before -- Barnes clearing the field of threats and her following in his wake to make sense of the pieces. He showed her how he'd progressed last time, pointing out spots where he'd do things differently and where unforeseen trouble had manifested. It was another lesson in her education in the art of close combat warfare; Barnes was a thoughtful teacher, as always, explaining options not chosen and why and what to do if something went wrong. He'd done it before they'd gone in to Springfield and Searcy, but not with this level of detail and not with the expectation that she'd understand -- and very likely need to put his teaching into practice. His goal at their previous stops had been to save her from the fighting entirely, but here, he understood, that was more aspirational. Modoc was the focus of something very important and had been built to withstand an attack even before Barnes had started his retribution. 

Which was why he offered her one last chance to back out. 

"I can get you a train ticket up to New York," he said quietly one evening as they worked, him on his maps and her on their notebooks of the past-turning-future. "You can go to Stark Junior and he'll figure out a way to get you back without walking through a wall of gunfire to do it. I'll promise to find you in '46 if you want me to."

She finished writing down the last of the names from the Wikipedia article and then put her pen down. "If you are not comfortable with me as your 'battle buddy,' then say so and I'll accept your offer. But otherwise, we have been over this before, again and again. Neither of us deserve to fight our way home and we both have other, safer options available to us. And we are not choosing those other, safer options for the same reason: because we are ashamed to face Steve because he knows what we have done or will do to render his sacrifice in vain. And so we choose the wall of gunfire over the unconditional forgiveness of the man we both love. Be honest with yourself, Sergeant. What we're about to do isn't wise or necessary and it may end badly and we are not doing it for the best of reasons, however idealistic our plans to change history might be.

"But I trust you and I have faith in you and have followed you into the breach before and am prepared to do it again. Now, unless you'd like to restate your offer under the conditions I've set out, I will consider it withdrawn and ask you instead if Ngo Dinh Diem is really such an important individual to carry back in our book of names."

She met Barnes's gaze and held it and let him see whatever it was he wanted to see before breaking away and shaking his head. He sighed, then grimaced, then nodded. "HYDRA didn't care about Vietnam itself, but the war there got them into a lot of other places they wouldn't have been able to get otherwise."

That night, she dreamed of home -- England home, her parents' home -- for the first time in the future and she considered it a good omen. She'd gotten used to missing her family and school friends, first during the war and then by moving to America, but while in 2015, she'd tried not to think about the possibility that she'd never see them again. She would get back, one way or the other, and she would go home for Christmas, which she hadn't been since 1940.

Getting Barnes to see his family would be a battle of some enormity, but she hoped to win that one, too. It would be a lot easier with Steve at her side.

They made one more trip to Modoc in another stolen car, verifying that nothing had changed and timing some of the steps of their plan's ingress and egress. It would all go to hell once they started, but the better they understood the plan beforehand, the easier it would be to recover once their carefully ordered maneuvers fell apart. 

The day before they left Charlotte for good, they separated for a few hours to complete final errands. For her, it was last-minute items like hairpins and stockings, things she'd need to dress appropriately once she was home, plus an extra box of adhesive bandages. Barnes's to-do list involved going to the post office to mail the box of hard drives and portable data storage to the Avengers so that they could figure out what was going on at those three new bases. When he returned, however, she did a double-take.

"Don't you look handsome," she said with a smile as Barnes self-consciously ran his fingers through his newly shortened hair.

"It'll be hard enough covering up the arm," he said sourly, but she didn't miss the grin he'd tried to hide. "No point in looking like a hobo if we're going to be out and about."

Which was a concession to her victory -- he wouldn't run from her once they were back in 1946 -- and she accepted it graciously by pretending not to notice.

The morning of their departure, they had a lovely breakfast at a proper restaurant and then quietly left the clothes and other items they would not need anymore outside a charity shop. They had each kept enough to get them through should the unthinkable happen and they both fail and survive the failure, but Barnes had stuffed a few of the bearer bonds into the pockets of the rest, with the balance being dropped off in the donation box at a church that listed a wide range of programs for the poor and helpless. It had been his idea and she'd readily agreed, privately marveling at how the man could ever doubt his worth and capacity for humanity.

And then they left for _home_.

The only place to watch the house save by parking right in front was to go into the forest across the road and climb the incline so that they could look down upon the house with very little obstruction. The problem was that it was a completely obvious surveillance site and backlit most of the day, which meant that they had to wait until dark and then Barnes swept the area for any signs of electronic monitoring or booby traps. They spent the night and the following day lying prone in sleeping bags taking shifts looking through disguised binoculars with silenced pistols at their sides; breaks to pee or stretch required slithering on elbows in a crawl so as to keep their profile low and unnoticeable.

What they saw was both mildly comforting and not nearly enough. Barnes found the gun emplacements in the upper floor right away, all the more reason to approach as a friendly, but there was very little active counter-surveillance going on. A woman came out every few hours to walk a german shepherd dog around the property, they occasionally saw the glint of binoculars from the attic, and they saw cameras aimed directly at the roadway in both directions, but the kind that took photographs, Barnes said and not video.

"The police use the same kind at intersections to nab people for running red lights," he explained. "They'll take a picture of the license plates and maybe get some images of who's at the wheel, but that's lazy and useless. We drove by twice in two different cars and it meant nothing to them. The whole setup says that whatever this place will be important for in the future, it's not yet. They're complacent -- or they're idiots. Either way, they won't be on duty once this place becomes active."

"Thank heavens for small mercies," she replied. "But I'd like to know how many lazy villains we'll need to get past."

There was very little traffic to and fro during the day to say. A postman delivering mail. A man and a woman in regular civilian clothes emerging from the house, driving a car from the driveway, and returning with a brown paper bag with celery poking out of the top. At night, however, there was a box truck that pulled up with its lights off and a half-dozen men emerged from the house to unload it. It was mostly food, crates of milk containers and prepared meals of the sort she'd seen in Wal-Mart that only had to be microwaved. It meant that there were people hidden down below, but the quantities weren't so vast to indicate an army unless these were nightly deliveries.

The second day and night was much the same, save for there being no delivery of any sort. Just before dawn, they climbed down from their perch and trudged back to the car, hidden deeper in the woods by what Barnes said was a motocross track, which like so much of the present-future still did, meant nothing to her. "It's what Steve used to do during the war on the bike, except with nobody shooting at you."

"Softies," she scoffed, despite remembering full well how she'd tear strips off of Steve when he returned from missions with the sorts of scrapes that could only come from a motorcycle driving at speed through the woods.

Barnes's chuckle could possibly be interpreted as him remembering, too.

They spent the day in Augusta, down in Georgia, at a motel that clearly catered to a certain clientele when the clerk didn't blink at their mussed appearance and accepted cash up front before asking with a straight face if he should register them as Mister and Missus Smith or Jones.

"Jones, definitely," she replied. "Gabe would be appalled."

"Gabe would be appalled," Barnes agreed and he smiled, a little pained, but mostly just at the happy memory. Gabe Jones was the best-mannered, best-read, most-cultured of all of the Commandos and the only one who would avert his gaze if Steve dared to show her any affection in public. (In "public," since it was only ever in front of the Commandos, despite everyone being aware enough to make comments.)

In truth, Gabe would have had nothing to even raise an eyebrow at, since they only took turns taking showers before falling into separate beds to sleep the day away. In the evening, she dragged Barnes to the most ridiculous restaurant in town that she could find online, which was something called a "Mongolian grill," where the ordering was done on tablets. It was the most futuristic final meal she could have imagined to bid farewell to 2015 and Barnes, rather than being disturbed by the noise and the crowd and the dim lighting, seemed to be mostly amused. And hungry.

And then they left Georgia and drove back to Modoc. It was just dark when they pulled into the driveway of the safehouse and they were both acutely aware that every movement and motion was being watched from somewhere. But they played it casual and business-like, going to the trunk to retrieve their time-travel knapsacks that also contained the weapons Barnes had thought they'd need to take the base. And then they marched right up the front steps and rang the doorbell.

The dog-walking woman answered it, a cautious and curious smile on her face that was presumably to indicate that unexpected visitors were rare.

"Hail HYDRA," Peggy said in a perfunctory manner. From the war, she'd learned that the more important the individual, the less likely he (or she) was to put effort into ritual. The most desultory 'Heil Hitler's had come from the highest ranking members of the Nazi party and Schmidt's top commanders had said 'Hail HYDRA' as one might say 'good afternoon.' "My name is Margaret and this is James. I believe we are expected."

Shifting the onus of proof from the two of them to whoever ran things at the base was easy. Withstanding the confusion that necessarily followed was the hard part; HYDRA had very good reason to fear the attentions of legitimate law enforcement and the most likely scenario was that the two of them were vanguards of a larger assault party. As opposed to simple infiltration, which would be far more likely at a recruiting station and at the training camps, and which was ultimately why Barnes had agreed to go along with her plan.

"I'm sorry," the woman replied with a confused tone. "I believe you've come to the wrong address."

Peggy huffed in irritation. "I have not. We have been traveling all day because apparently the plans have been accelerated and we were told to be here straightaway to start preparations to welcome our guest."

The plan, such as it was, was to bank on Barnes's guess about Modoc's purpose being correct: HYDRA was planning on bringing someone forward in time. If (when) that failed, then they could resort to shooting their way to the time device. 

"I don't--" the woman was cut off by a man coming up behind her and pulling the door open wider so that he could see. He wasn't pretending that this was the wrong address, not with the shotgun in his free hand.

"Now who are you, Margaret and James, that you're showing up on our doorstep right at dinnertime," he asked with menace coursing freely under Southern charm.

"We are the historians," she told him flatly, unimpressed by the show of force. There was a screen door between them; all she and Barnes had to do was dive to the sides to avoid getting shot. "You can show as much video as we have, but that won't ease the transition nor will it address most of the immediate concerns. We are the period experts on HYDRA's earliest years, so unless you're prepared to be able to answer questions about Georg Heininger or Laurenz Stoll, we're going to be seeing a fair bit of each other."

She waited, meeting Shotgun Man's gaze and holding it while trying to look irritated, which really wasn't all that hard. To be so close to the device, to be so close to going _home_ and this foolish man standing in the way... No, it wasn't hard at all.

Next to her, Barnes stirred enough to draw Shotgun Man's attention. "And you're a historian, too?"

Barnes smiled back, all sly mischief. "You are not going to find anyone who knows more about HYDRA's super-soldier program than me, sir."

It took a few more challenges, a few more prods to see if their story was so easily punctured while agents were sent out to scour the area for a waiting attack force. But in the end, the shotgun came down and the screen door opened because this had been a well-calculated risk. Having extensively studied HYDRA's supply chain meant that they could drop locations and occasionally names with ease, making it easier to accept that they were who they said they were. Because the alternative, that they were undercover agents, meant that the authorities knew of all of HYDRA's major bases, including the three new super-bases, and could roll them up at whim. It was better -- natural -- to believe that HYDRA was the superior force and that Margaret and James were who they said they were. 

Faith and optimism had led better men to worse fates, so she felt only relief as she and Barnes were allowed in. She didn't drop her guard, nor did Barnes, who kept close to her as unobtrusively as he could.

"I don't know any more than you do," she assured Shotgun Man, whose name was actually Mike. "All we were told was that they'd found what they were looking for and hie thee down to Modoc."

Mike looked cautiously hopeful, which lent credence to the idea that whatever was supposed to be happening here, it required the maser. Which as near as she knew, HYDRA was no closer to possessing than when they'd dragged her forward in time to help them.

The woman, Connie, looked almost disappointed, but hid it behind suspicion. "And where were you hie-ing from?"

"I came from Worcester," Barnes answered before Peggy could speak. "Ever see the wipe machine in person?"

He said it with such cheerful enthusiasm that Peggy gave him a look -- but so did Connie and Mike. Of course, they weren't covering their horror with surprise. They had no horror, they were just fascinated because this was the sort of thing HYDRA did to people all the time.

"It looks like a dentist's chair," he went on in the same exuberant tone, miming reclining in a chair. "But instead of a drill, you get a Google Glass. And a bite-guard." 

Mike led them toward the kitchen, which was indeed set up for dinner preparation and had a pair of bowls on the floor for the dog, named Alfred. "Everyone else lives downstairs," Mike explained. "I'd rather be down there, to be honest, instead of playing pretend up here. But everyone knows everyone around here and we haven't been established very long, so we play along. On that front, were you supposed to quarter here or nearby? We have the space, but not the supplies -- we weren't expecting anyone for another few months at least."

"Until there's something for us to do," Peggy replied, "We'll stay in Augusta and commute up when required rather than stretch your resources. I presume Starkville was caught as unawares as you were and won't have the trucks loaded for a few days at least. And, frankly, I am not looking forward to residing in a mushroom farm."

Starkville, Mississippi, a location both she and Barnes had assumed was anything but coincidental, was the supply center for 'soft' items like cots and tinned food for the southern US HYDRA bases. The truck that had delivered items the previous night had probably come from there. 

"Luz's going to be unhappy," Connie agreed. "You got anything against cilantro?"

While Connie returned to her dinner preparation -- it was taco night -- Mike offered to show them the downstairs. Barnes agreed for them, shooting Peggy a look that was as much warning as surprise -- they had both agreed that the ruse was likely to break down before they got downstairs. That it hadn't was either unusually good luck or the prelude to a set-up and they had to prepare for both. Toward that end, Peggy justified keeping their backpacks on instead of leaving them in the living room by saying they would both need to take notes about what would be needed later on and then, with some feigned reluctance, admitting that they both carried materials that could not be left out of their sights, which was why they'd taken them from the car in the first place. 

The stairwell to the downstairs was through a closet door off the main hallway and required a biometric lock, which Peggy had no idea what that was but Barnes did and asked a question about a database that Mike seemed to think was important and was pleased by the answer he had to give. It still looked like a doorknob to her. 

The downstairs looked familiar but not, perhaps from Barnes's drawings and perhaps from her shaky memories of the facility in Havre de Grace. The walls were the same color, the lighting the same, but it looked strange for being a place she was trying to go and not trying to escape from. They passed by a canteen with a dozen men and women sitting down to eat scattered around three long tables and Mike introduced James and Margaret with a triumphant tone because their arrival meant that the next phase of Operation Wiederherstellung would soon be underway. Peggy gave Barnes a look because they both knew exactly what that word meant and there was no possible translation of it that didn't mean something very horrible. Modern HYDRA was explicitly not a Germanic organization and to use that language, especially with respect to a plan involving the past... 

There were cheers from the diners. Peggy smiled at their enthusiasm, making it look genuine by imagining their defeat. 

The tour continued on past rooms both open and closed, all with the lights off. "We'll go to a 24-hour schedule once things are up and running," Mike explained. "No point in keeping more than the security detail up all night when there's nothing to be done that can't wait until morning and plenty that can't be done until everyone else is online." 

Barnes sneezed in front of a closed door that on his blueprints had been the generator room. Peggy simply said "gesundheit." 

Biometric locks, it turned out, were more important than she'd realized because it was another one of those that proved to be their undoing. There was an artifact room, one that would store everything that would be needed for the Modoc phase of Operation Wiederherstellung's implementation. It had a biometric lock that Mike suggested she open, since she was standing closest to it. 

"I doubt I'd be in the database yet if they didn't even tell you I was coming," she pointed out reasonably. 

Mike shrugged. "That's on the general permissions file for now," he said. "We basically use it as regular storage and anyone can get in -- it's only locked after working hours because of regs. Everything that needs special clearance is in the safe and nobody gets in there but me and Connie and Hiroshi."

"In that case," she agreed, looking at Barnes, who nodded. She wiped her palm on her pants leg as she'd seen Mike do upstairs, and turned to open the door. 

Mike hit the ground with a grunt and his head at a grotesque angle. Barnes, expression neutral, picked him right back up again and held out his limp arm, indicating that she use it to open the door, which she did. The lights turned on automatically as they entered what was, indeed, a temporary storage area. There was a box of printer paper on the floor underneath a plastic bag with light bulbs poking out and other banal but necessary elements of modern office life that she'd recognized from Searcy and Springfield. 

"See if you can find the safe," Barnes told her, dropping Mike's body in a far corner, behind a pair of standing fans. He then unshouldered his backpack and took off his blazer and dress shirt, revealing the kevlar undershirt before covering it back up with the black load-bearing vest and arming himself for combat. "I'm going to go clear the floor."

They could continue on without risk of exposure for a short time, but should anyone from the canteen come to ask a question of Mike or should Connie come down to tell them that dinner was ready, it would be much harder to recover cleanly. 

"Be careful," she told him, stripping off her own blazer and putting on the holster and checking her pistol. "We don't know how many are upstairs or how quickly Connie can bring in reinforcements."

They hadn't had much time in Searcy. 

Barnes closed the door behind him. It wouldn't protect her if anyone could get in, but it would buy her time. 

She heard an explosion of gunfire and shouting while she was still on the first wall of the room -- it was cluttered with items and there were brooms lying against what could be safe doors but weren't. She doubted it would be audible from upstairs -- she'd been standing right next to the entrance in Maryland when Barnes had blown up the underground and it had been a very dull roar. But an alarm sounded, a piercing shriek she also remembered from Maryland and that would absolutely alert the upstairs. She could only work so fast, however.

The safe was on the second wall, a panel of a different shade than the rest, and she did her best to drag Mike's body over to it without falling over -- at least she wouldn't have to lift it up. The safe contained a laptop -- really, did these people never learn? -- and two paper notebooks and a metal box that was the size of a shoebox but improbably heavy even though it looked like lead. She emptied out the printer paper from the box, which had handles cut into it, and stored everything inside. She carried it to the door, which she opened carefully. When that caused no reaction other than carrying in the smell of gunfire, she tossed a box of coffee filters into the hallway. When that, too, got no reaction, she opened up the door fully and propped it in that position with a nearby box of paper towels before taking a deep breath, unholstering her pistol, and stepping out herself.

There was no motion and no noise beyond the sound of the blaring alarm.

She retraced her steps to the generator room carefully, pausing at each doorway and making sure the path was clear. The generator room was locked, of course. But unlike the artifact room, it had a keyhole as well as a biometric lock. She had a pick set and thought she could figure it out, but it would take a few minutes and would leave her back exposed and her hands occupied as she worked. She continued on to the canteen, clearing as she went, and saw what Barnes had done. There was a well-labeled alarm button on the wall, but nobody had fallen anywhere near it, which made her wonder how it had been set off -- he'd clearly surprised everyone, with all but two shot in their seats and the pair of exceptions nowhere near either the door or the alarm. 

She went all the way to the staircase, finding no sign of either survivors or other corpses, before doubling back to the artifact room to get the box and then to the generator room. It would take too much work to drag someone there to use their hands on the lock, so she dug out her skeleton keys, put her pistol at the easiest reach point, and went to work with both ears open for either enemy or Barnes, who'd at least whistle on approach.

The first tumbler was surprisingly easy, the second much harder, and the third was proving extraordinarily slippery when she heard the cocking of a pistol's hammer right by her left ear.

"I would not move if I were you," a woman's voice warned. "I take that back. Drop what you're holding and put your hands flat against the door and _then_ don't move."

It was a minor miracle she hadn't been shot in the head already, so perhaps they wanted her alive -- perhaps Connie had recognized her and Barnes from the get-go and the alarm had been announcing the arrival of reinforcements. 

The barrel never left the soft spot behind her ear as a hand quickly and professionally stripped her of her obvious weapons and searched her for hidden ones. 

"On my mark," the woman said calmly, "You are going to stand up, sliding your hands against the door. And on my second mark, you are going to turn around very slowly and keep your arms raised."

With no alternatives and only the hope that Barnes was standing behind her captors waiting for a chance to strike, she complied. With her face still to the door, the siren suddenly stopped. 

"Finally," the woman said with irritation. "Now, turn."

Who she saw when she complied was not who she expected and, clearly, the feeling was mutual. 

"Jesus Christ," the Black Widow chuffed out with a surprised laugh. "This day officially just got even stranger."

Behind her was not Barnes, but instead a girl Peggy recognized by costume as the Scarlet Witch.

"May I put my arms down now?" Peggy asked tartly. 

The Black Widow did not lower her weapon or turn to her partner as she spoke. "Wanda?"

The girl's eyes glowed red for a moment and Peggy felt a sharp, quick spike of pain in her head that disappeared as suddenly as it had come.

"Not a mask," Wanda reported, speaking with an accent. "She is Peggy Carter."

The internet had been extraordinarily vague about the Scarlet Witch's powers, making her seem godlike in their limitlessness. But the idea that the girl had gone into her head was abhorrent.

"Don't do that again," Peggy snapped at her. 

The girl was manifestly unbothered at the response. 

"Cap," Black Widow said, holding her free hand to her ear. "I think you're going to want to come down here.... Yeah, I know, but I don't think he's going anywhere without his partner.... No, you get to find out on your own because I asked you once and you didn't answer then.... tough shit."

Without asking again, Peggy put her arms down, drawing a raised eyebrow but no other response. 

The wait for Steve's arrival was interminable, although it was perhaps only a couple of minutes at most. She heard heavy footsteps on the staircase, then another set and voices too low to make out the words but she could tell who it was because she'd heard those two muttering to each other a thousand times. The tiny part of her mind not overcome by anticipation felt for Barnes, who'd fled Steve so many times but was staying only because she was here.

And then they turned the corner and Steve was all she could see. Until she could see nothing because her eyes were full of tears. 

"Peggy?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [A notice for this story was posted to tumblr if you'd like to like or reblog.](http://laporcupina.tumblr.com/post/142145070379/sleepers-of-ephesus-34)


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